Ignite Continuous Improvement In Your Scrum Team
5 Do-it-yourself workshops to amplify deep learning in your team, and to reflect & improve, continuously
Research shows that continuous improvement is more likely to happen in Scrum teams where (shared) learning is encouraged, where people feel safe to admit mistakes, and where quality drives those improvements. And that makes sense. You are bound to run into mistakes, unexpected problems, and tough challenges in the kind of complex work that product development is. It takes your collective brainpower as a team, other teams, and your stakeholders to overcome those challenges.
The do-it-yourself workshops we share in this blog post will help your team improve how they learn. Use them as your next format for the Sprint Retrospective, or whenever you feel the team can benefit from a conscious learning moment. Learning should never be limited to the Sprint Retrospective only. The workshops give you specific suggestions, they also include a step-by-step approach to use them and help you move in the right direction.
The five workshops are:
- Do-It-Yourself Workshop: Invite Deep Learning Into Your Sprint Retrospectives
- DIY workshop: Amplify Learning In Your Team With More Double-Loop Learning
- Do-It-Yourself Workshop: Identify What To Start, Stop, And Improve In Your Scrum Team With Ecocycle Planning
- Do-It-Yourself Workshop: Your Impact As A Scrum Practitioner
- Do-It-Yourself Workshop: Make Learning An Ongoing Activity, Not A Scrum Event
In this blog post, we offer you a short description of these workshops. We hope it inspires you to give them a try. Once you’ve used them, let us know the results, and let’s learn and grow, together!
Note that we ask for a small donation in return for each workshop (5 USD). You can also support us on Patreon to download our digital content for free (note that this benefit starts from the “Contributor”-tier and onward).
Workshop #1: Invite Deep Learning Into Your Sprint Retrospectives
Doing Scrum well is hard. But you know that. This means that continuous learning and improvement are necessary to overcome those pesky impediments that keep popping up. It also requires a lot of creativity and outside-of-the-box thinking.
One way to think of the Scrum framework is to understand it as a framework for continuous improvement. Every Sprint brings with it a new opportunity to experiment with potential improvements. Some will work and some won’t. Teams that don’t leverage these learning opportunities, inevitably wither away into Zombie Scrum.
One excellent moment for such learning to take place, but certainly not the only one, is the Sprint Retrospective. At least once per Sprint, the Scrum team takes a moment to reflect on how to improve their process, their technology, and their collaboration with stakeholders. It’s an opportunity to improve the Definition of Done and to figure out how to make the next Sprint more enjoyable.
But for many Scrum teams, the Sprint Retrospective doesn’t feel like an important learning opportunity at all. Conversations remain superficial, the “elephant in the room” is never really addressed and the same improvements keep being raised — without actually implementing them. In those circumstances, it is no surprise when Scrum teams prefer to skip them.
We designed this short 60-minute workshop to get out of this rut. Essentially, we ask your team to reflect on the effectiveness of the Sprint Retrospective and learning in your team in general.
Workshop #2: Amplify Learning In Your Team With More Double-Loop Learning
Do you remember the first few weeks of your first professional job? It’s entirely likely that you were struck by weird rules, awkward procedures, and illogical ways of working. But like most of us, you probably started excepting that as “the way we do things here” after a while, without second-guessing it.
This is a simple illustration of single- and double-loop learning as defined by the organizational theorist Chris Argyris. It is an important part of our book the Zombie Scrum Survival Guide. Single-loop learning focuses on solving a problem within an existing system that is defined by sets of beliefs, structures, roles, procedures, and norms. Double-loop learning challenges the system, and underlying beliefs themselves. But unfortunately, as our experience grows, we are often increasingly blinded by it to see new options.
Although both types of learning are important for continuous improvement to happen, double-loop learning is important in particular for complex work where teams have to constantly challenge not only how they do the work, but also why. Teams affected by Zombie Scrum tend to limit themselves to single-loop learning and can’t benefit from double-loop learning because their existing beliefs about management, products, how to manage people, and how to manage risk remain unchallenged.
We created this do-it-yourself workshop to make your team aware of how different levels of learning are possible. And to help your team learn more effectively by using double-loop learning to challenge their existing ways of working and the system in which that works takes place.
Workshop #3: Identify What To Start, Stop, And Improve In Your Scrum Team With Ecocycle Planning
How is your Scrum team investing in its ability to work empirically? To work closely with stakeholders? To release faster? To increase the autonomy of the team and reduce their dependency on others? And to persistently find the time to improve in all these areas?
In our book we identify four areas that matter most to professional Scrum:
- Build What Stakeholders Need
- Ship It Fast
- Improve Continuously
- Self-organize Around Impediments
How is your team investing in the activities that make this possible? We created this exercise to help your team create transparency around how they are investing their time, and where improvements can be made.
The exercise is built on the powerful Liberating Structure “Ecocycle Planning”. With this structure, you engage everyone in and around your team to create transparency around the activities that prevent Zombie Scrum. For example: “We celebrate our successes, both large and small”, “We decide what is on the Product Backlog and in what order, without requiring approval from people outside the team” and “We improve our tools and technologies to make it easier to ship faster and safer”.
This do-it-yourself workshop uses examples from the card deck Ecocycle Planning for Scrum Teams, which is available in our webshop. You can also create your own cards with activities.
Workshop #4: Your Impact As A Scrum Practitioner
The Scrum framework exists to help you, your team, and your organization to better navigate the risks that are inherent to uncertain and complex work. It does so by giving you a basic outline where you work in small steps towards a larger objective, measuring your progress along the way. All the elements of the framework — the roles, events, and artifacts — serve that purpose.
No matter how appealing that purpose sounds, it is easy to forget about it in the daily challenges Scrum teams face. Product Owners can easily forget to gather feedback from actual stakeholders in their drive to add “just a few more features”. Scrum Masters can spend most of their Sprints preparing awesome Sprint Retrospectives while forgetting about the larger impediments plaguing their team. Developers easily lose sight of the need to release frequently over their desire to add all sorts of nice bells and whistles. Although all of this happens for understandable reasons, it limits the ability of teams to work empirically.
We designed this string to help Scrum practitioners reflect on their impact on the empirical process that underlies the Scrum framework. For some, this string can be a hard wake-up call that they’ve been focusing on the wrong things. For others, it will be a confirmation that they’re going in the right direction.
Workshop #5: Make Learning An Ongoing Activity, Not A Scrum Event
Where in the Scrum framework do reflection and learning happen? You’re only partially right if your answer is the “Sprint Retrospective”. Because although learning should certainly happen there, it’s a waste of opportunities to do it *only* during Sprint Retrospectives. There are many ways to encourage learning throughout the Sprint in a way that makes it a natural part of your work together.
With this workshop, we offer you a collection of powerful questions to help your team reflect, learn and improve, continuously. We also described specific opportunities for when & how to use them. Not as facilitated retrospective formats, but as learning moments that can take place anywhere, anytime during the Sprint.
Similar to backlog refinement, learning shouldn’t be a Scrum event, but an ongoing activity. Give these questions a try, and let us know what conversation it sparked!
Closing
We created these 5 do-it-yourself workshops to amplify deep learning in your team and to reflect & improve, continuously. If you tried the workshops, let us know how it went. Your thoughts, ideas, and experiences are invaluable to us. Only together, we can create even more valuable content, and unleash the superpowers of Scrum teams, all around the world!
