Celebration Grid As A Sprint Retrospective Tool
Celebrate what matters during your retrospectives!
Key Takeaway:
Retrospectives must be vehicles to transform a team’s culture to celebrate learning, and we can use the celebration grid to make it that way.
Retrospectives, Retrospectives!
A sprint retrospective is one of the most important meetings during a sprint. It’s the time when the team comes together to reflect upon and learn from the previous sprint. It’s a great way to identify problems that you might have missed and to improve the team going forward. When I talk with scrum teams about how they hold their sprint retrospectives, I often feel that something is missing. Many use the standard format of listing what went well, what did not go so well, and discussing the results. Others have added fun elements such as puzzles, games, or group activities. While these are great additions, the retrospective can be more than just a meeting. The question is: How do we stimulate creativity? How do we celebrate experimentation and learning needed to be innovative to create tomorrow’s products? This post is about using a simple visual tool, the Celebration Grid, to do just this and learn to celebrate what matters in a team. It’s an excellent way to keep a team focused on innovation.
Why Celebrate Learning & Experimentation?
What a team chooses to celebrate will set the team’s culture and determine whether they will be innovative. We generally classify tasks that we do as part of our work into best practices and bad practices based on our outcomes prediction. Best practices usually work with some sense of repeatability, and bad practices or mistakes do not work. Doing a simple spell check before I publish this article can be an example of good practice. Not doing that is a mistake or a bad practice. We also see that despite our best intentions, best practices fail sometimes. We do get lucky sometimes and get a successful outcome even when we make a mistake. We often overlook or do not risk experimenting where we do not know the result apriori. The chances of success or failure are 50–50. We do not learn much by continuously repeating best practices that are known to produce good outcomes. Neither do we learn much by repeating the same mistakes expecting different results.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
- Albert Einstein
Sure, we learn when a best practice leads to failure or a mistake leads to success, but these happen rarely. So what should we celebrate? Celebrating failures caused by errors does not help us to become innovative. We should indeed celebrate success as it will convert good practices into habits. But doing only this leads to risk-averse team culture, leading to the death of creativity and innovation, where the team will keep repeating the rewarding experiences. Teams that are innovative and create incredible products need to learn continuously. How do we use sprint retrospectives to foster this culture of learning, creativity, and innovation? Below I describe how I used the Celebration Grid to bring about this transformation.
The Celebration Grid — A Retrospective Tool to Nurture Creativity and Innovation in Teams
The purpose of the celebration grid is to encourage team members to celebrate what they have learned. It helps teams to be more creative and productive in a very visual way. It’s a Management 3.0 agile management practice pioneered by Jurgen Appelo. Below is the grid [1].
I have included the link to a blank copy of the grid for your reference here[1]. You can download it and use it as a background in collaboration or brainstorming tools like Miro. Each zone is an area where team members can place an action from the last week.
How to Use the Celebration Grid in Retros
Once you have the grid set up in your favorite collaboration tool like Miro or have it drawn on a flip chart or whiteboard, you are ready to start. My experience in initiating the celebration grid as a retro tool (an experiment in itself) began with the team being introduced to the grid. They learn the intent and what we should celebrate as a team going forward. We encourage the team to open up and see if they feel safe to run experiments and fail but still learn. If they are practicing Scrum well and are already a mature team, most teams will be open and have a safe to fail environment. If you feel that this is not the case, then assuring the team members that failure is acceptable and using the grid as a tool to even record their current observations for a few sprints will be a start towards creating such an environment and team.
You can start by using the standard three-question format to think of what worked, what did not work, and what can be improved, and the team members start adding sticky notes on the board, classifying them as either practices that were successful and mistakes that led to failure. Next, the team members identify any experiments they have run in the past sprint and categorize them as failures or successes. This should give you a good starting point. Now its time to ask the most critical question for each of the sticky notes:
“What did we learn?”
We add the learnings to the bottom of the grid in the learning region. So the grid will start to look like the below at this point.
Another aspect that the teams can choose to add is the experiments they wish to try in the upcoming sprints, along with expected learnings in a funnel at the top of the grid’s experiments zone. They also identify one high value and impact experiment to try out in the next upcoming sprint. This is added to the outlet of the funnel to feed into the experiment zone. The teams can also repeat an experiment that they did the past sprint to see if they could reproduce any positive results.
The key to success is using the celebration grid to stick with it and use the grid for at least three retros. During the next sprint retro, the teams check if any experiments that they repeated from the previous sprint can be converted into a practice that the team can rely on as a best practice. The goal is to highlight any learning and internalize these into the team’s mental models. We try to convert as many experiments into practices that we follow to become a better team.
With practice and if the experiment to use the celebration grid as the retrospective tool becomes a success, some teams chose to add a “Wall of Shame” and a “Wall of Fame.” We move out mistakes that the team has stopped making and practices that have become a habit and part of the team culture, respectively, to those zones.
We love the Grid!
The teams that I work with love the celebration grid. We identified three main reasons for this when we did a meta-retrospective on the experiment of using the grid.
Firstly, the grid emphasizes all the positive aspects that are happening in the team. It focuses on the different experiments we run, practices we were doing even without realizing it worth cherishing and applauding. We also learned that the mistakes recorded in each sprint drops consistently as any mistakes made are automatically converted into learning opportunities and become experiments.
Secondly, we realized that we love running experiments and becoming better, faster, and happier. We started to run more experiments, leading to more celebrations of learning, further reinforcing this positive loop.
Thirdly, we realized that team cultures transform positively. Even if we do not have a safe to fail environment in the team initially, using the grid consistently led to one. We learned to be vulnerable with each other, open to the possibility of failure, and not be risk-averse, creating the culture needed to experiment and innovate more.
Disclaimer:
These are my personal experiences and views and in no way represent the opinions or stances of my employer, Ansys.
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