Sticky dots and a Lego trophy: the return of in-person workshops
A toe in the water towards creating “moments that matter”
Number 2 Marylebone Road is a Grade II listed building, in the Regency style reflecting the era it was built. It was designed and made real by the superstar architect of the day Sir John Soane. When he wasn’t creating the Bank of England building in Threadneedle Street, or doing a few bits to the House of Lords, he was dotting Regents Park with exceptional Greco-Roman mansions.
Through the 19th century, 2 Marylebone Road was used as a church, its parishioners including the Duke of Wellington. In the 1960s it became a commercial space, in the 1980s the Which? Consumer Group made it their home and in 2017 it underwent an extensive modernisation programme. So now, behind the cream marble and ornate balconies, sits a best-in-class Tech hub.
Glass meeting rooms. Soundproofed booths. Multi-coloured Breakout areas.
Like an Apple Watch inside a Fabergé egg.
You know the ending of Back to the Future III, when Doc Brown shows up in a flying Victorian steam train with the Flux Capacitor hardwired into it? It’s a bit like that.
The jewel in the crown however, is the Fourth floor conference area. It is a huge open space, with white concertinaed ceilings and angled windows that bathe the room in sunlight. It opens out to a rooftop terrace where the people of Which? are invited to enjoy their lunch breaks or an evening drink in the Regents Park sunset. By re-arranging the seating, it can feel busy with forty people, or buzzing with 150.
Now that we post-Covid and going back into London again, it’s a space that can create magic moments and memories.
Recently I hosted the first in-person Quarterly retrospective for the Which? Product and Tech Squads framework. My manager Kevin Curtis and I wanted to get everyone ‘back up on the fourth floor’— exchanging ideas and enjoying the space again. For the first time since Lockdown, we dared to dream of exchanging schemes outside of Miro and Google hangouts. There will always be a place for digital conferencing tools, but we wanted to bring people together. Here’s my take on what went well, what didn’t work, and the feedback for future improvements.
“Retrospective Workshop? Not another one!”
At Which?, our Product and Tech teams (called “squads”) deliver commercial as well as not-for-profit products and services for the Great British public. People trust Which?’s advice when buying a washing machine because we are famously impartial and methodical in product testing. We also produce an award-winning monthly magazine, as well as tailored Lifestyle products (Gardening, Computing, Money and Travel). We offer consumer advice too — with free-to-use tools helping people face the Cost of Living crisis, helping victims of scams, and mortgage hunting. We have a newly improved App, and are currently undergoing a migration to a microservice-based CRM system. 7 squads manage all of this, busily designing and developing product on a quarterly basis. Using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), the teams are encouraged to set their own goals and solve their own problems —with a thin layer of alignment managed by the Delivery Managers (which is where I come in). They can use Kanban, Scrum or any Agile framework they want, as long as it’s hosted in JIRA and gets the job done.
Having the teams to come into the office especially for a workshop was a bit of an ask; we are a fully hybrid organisation with an expectation that people only need to be office-present one or two days a week. We were also conscious that the squads already hold fortnightly retrospectives, host fortnightly check-ins (our version of Sprint Reviews), as well as end-of-quarter showcases. It was therefore important to make the workshop valuable and interesting, to avoid ‘Brenda from Bristol’ style heartache.
Kevin and I have felt that the collective spirit of the framework needed some attention and support. No squad operates in a vacuum, so it’s vital that the 60-odd members of the 7 squads (plus specialist contributors) take a breath, talk about what we are doing, and ideate improvements.
We called it focussing on the HOW instead of the WHAT, and this was my pitch sent out the the various Slack groups:
So now we just had to put some bums on seats. If you build it, they will come…
Pop Music, voting and trophies
A team of five were responsible for hosting the event, and were all aligned on some sort of fun-work-fun sandwich being our best shot at success. I recently achieved certification in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC), and one of my big takeaways was Sharon Bowman’s Teaching from the Back of the Room. In the book, Bowman states that people are at their most engaged and engaging when their brains are in an active rather than passive state. She lists six ‘trumps’ — preferred states of learning that will generate better results. Bowman also insists that the tutor or facilitator should not be centre stage, hogging the class or workshop with “Death by Powerpoint” and solo turns. So my advice to anyone running a workshop is follow the 6 Bowman trumps, and leave your inner Brent at home.
Joe Clift, a fellow Delivery Manager, had been using a “what was number one when you were born?” warm-up in his squad retros recently. So building upon that, we created the Which? World Cups of Birthsongs. We asked every attendee to submit the song that was number one the week they were born, with a view to hosting a mass exercise in democracy and pop music excellence. The songs and their cover artwork was stuck to brown paper on the walls, and then three sticky dot votes each would narrow the field down to a handful of songs.
We secured a small amount of budget for some drinks, brown paper for the walls and a Lego trophy. Sharpies, post-its and sticky dots were borrowed from the Product department stationery stash. So we had our ‘fun pudding’ all worked out, now we had to focus on delivering our ‘work dinner’.
SAFe as houses
We took inspiration for a Big Room Retrospective from SAFe — in particular this great article on LinkedIn. We ensured the groups would be mixed to promote healthy conversation and for squaddies to get the chance to socialise with people they otherwise would not have. We used a standard Retrospective approach; freeform conversation leading to action. We had a facilitator in each group, and some giant ‘Buzz Topics’ on the flipcharts.
We wanted genuine observations from open conversations — with the groups then being pressed to convert these into something actionable and achievable in the next quarter.
The Product and Tech official in-office day is a Thursday. There is always a great atmosphere around the site, with check-ins, and huddles dominating squad members calendars. We took a risk and hosted this workshop on a Tuesday — because we wanted people to have the mental headspace to be fully ‘present’ in the session. This was a harder sell (getting people into the office a bit more than usual), but we felt it was worth the gamble. It was important for us that people arrived fresh, rather than it being tagged on at the end of a busy day full of meetings.
We wanted the workshop to be part Retrospective and part slap-on-the-back, so we called it our Celebration Retrospective, shortened to Cele-Spective. If I had my time again, I would have chosen a much better name for it. Cele-Spective sounds like a Celery exhibition. RetroSocial is an infinitely better name. You live and learn!
The Set Up
Thanks to the Birthsong prep work (using Google Forms of course) we knew we had 32 attendees. Not 100% coverage admittedly, but enough to get the ball rolling. A workshop had been booked immediately before ours — which didn’t give us long to set up. With hindsight, I would have prefixed 30 minutes prep time to the booking.
We amazingly got everything set up in 15 minutes flat — tables and flipcharts in place, sharpies and post-its laid out, the AV up and running. By 3.02pm, Kevin kicked off proceedings and the guys got-a-votin’. Parkinson’s Law of getting things Done!
Voting completed, legs refreshed, we had these two anthems to look forward to for the Grand Finalé..
But first, we had work to do..
The ‘spective
Conversation soon flowed and the stickies were written up and clustered on the flipcharts. After twenty minutes, each group played back the nuggets of their conversation to the wider group.
We then asked the groups to distil the talking points into two or three achievable actions. This is often the hardest part of a retrospective — turning what can be challenging sentiment into positive action. The teams did us proud — here’s some examples:
- Working with Programmes and OKRs — how might we better marry the two?
- Starting a chapter — working with Communities of Practice
- Slack hygiene — keeping our tools clean!
These actions were stuck to brown paper, and the trusty dot-voting gave us a clear winner 🟢 🟡 🟠..
“How can we improve the quality and attendance of the fortnightly check-ins? To make them more worthwhile…”
As a group, we agreed to set up a focus team to review what is working and what is not across the fortnightly check-in. We have committed to delivering clear change before January 1st 2023.
The “Cele”
Finally then, a quick blast on the soundsystem of Meatloaf and Human League to remind us of their pop majesty. No need for sticky dots this time — plain old human swarming gave us our overall winner. As you can see from the photos, there were clearly a lot of Phil Oakey fans in the room. Chris White claimed the trophy, and will hold on to it until we run the next c̶e̶l̶e̶-̶s̶p̶e̶c̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ retro-social. As any Delivery Manager will attest, these workshops are thirsty work. It was only fitting that we laid on some fizzy drinks for the guys to share at 5pm.
Final thoughts
Feedback on the session has been really positive, and those that couldn’t make it have committed to joining the next one in early January. You get out what you put in, so we are already planning ways to make the next one the best that it can be. As organisers, we have a duty to get this into people’s calendars as early as possible.
Our other commitment is to convert the action into deliverable value. We did the right thing in honing in on one clear objective rather than diluting the focus. It’s now important that we do the work to make it happen, otherwise we will lose the trust of everybody involved.
Once a quarter feels like the right cadence to make this type of event feel special and worth an extra day in the office. It will maximise our attendance rate, and ensure we get the best return on time spent. For everything else, there’s always Google Hangouts and Miro!
