If you're an agile practitioner here are 3 retro questions to ask yourself
OMG what a year..! I don't know about you but I'm exhausted and keen to put 2020 behind me and look towards what next year offers. During the last 12 months research tells us that the impact of the pandemic has actually rewired our brains. We are less optimistic and more fearful of threats. It is like a pessimistic COVID bias has enveloped the entire planet! So I wanted to share some techniques to self-facilitate an end of year retro; I'm calling it an introspective-retrospective. Here's an introduction video to the topic; the rest of the post goes into more detail.
The 3 questions of an introspective retrospective
I'd like to provide readers with some tips, techniques and hacks I've used to get past my own bias and learn from my experiences this year; its a self-coaching practice. I've arranged this post into 3 questions to help you look at yourself and your year from different angles/perspectives:
Did you stay close to your WHY this year? or forget what brought you to work in agile in the first place
Did you lose your passion? Did you have enough (any) peak emotional highs and experience flow?
Are you on the right career path? Are you acting out of fear (of losing your job) instead of curiosity/opportunity.
I'd like to unpack each of these and give you some guidance to self-facilitate your introspective retro. As you read be prepared to maybe take a pause and do the retro now; If you're really keen I've put some short videos into each section for your to watch too.
WHY do you work in agile?
Why does knowing your WHY matter? Simple, because being why-driven will naturally move you towards doing more of what you love and shape your career away from unfulfilling agile roles. Ok, I hear you asking.. so how do I find my why?
In amongst our everyday busyness it is difficult to find reflective space to get clear on our personal reason for wanting to be an agile practitioner. It is not always important to link who we our (our identity) to what we do for a job but I would like you to at least consider if work has any greater meaning for you. We spend so much time at work wouldn't it be cool if you could make a connection to a higher purpose instead of just collecting a pay cheque every month?
Here are two techniques to help you connect to your deeper WHY:
Experiment with using the 5-whys on this question "Why do you work in agile?" and then see where it takes you. I recently asked this of a customer that was moving his company towards an agile way of working and we got as far as two WHYs; there was no depth there. We then spent a few session together discovering and connecting him to a deeper sense of purpose and how it connects to agile's values. How deep is your connection to agile..?
Before I finish up on the topic of WHY I'd like to share a template you can use to help guide you to get some words down that describe your WHY. This comes from Zach Mercurio's book about purposefulness. He talks about your Why being in the service of others. Here's his handy template too:
I/We exist to ______________(action verb) _____________________ (humans, who?) to _____________________________ (think/feel/do/believe).
A nice quote from the book: "Nothing a person or organization undertakes exists for its own sake. Every product we use, company we work for, and academic degree we seek exists to help people and to solve some human problem or to fill a human need or desire."
This video provides a taste of his thinking: https://youtu.be/3vmdim2rlZU
(shout out to Ed OShaughnessy for this tip).
Below is a video where I use all of the above to outline my personal WHY as an example for you to learn from.
Do you have passion in your agile?
Being in flow should be every professional's goal as they work. Here's a definition directly from the person who literally wrote the book on flow; Cziksentmihalyi, ‘Flow: The psychology of optimal experience’ (2008).
“A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
Having read that don't you want to be in flow all the time? I do, but it is unreasonable to be having "the best time of your life" every minute of every day. So how much flow and fun is just enough to keep our work life meaningful? I wrote about tapping into flow in my book where I quoted research that indicated we only need 20% of our work week to involve flow for us to feel satisfied with our job and create meaning through our work. So as you retrospect your year, look for the times you were in flow; was it often, what was taking you out of flow, what could you do next year to bring more flow into your work?
Next I'd like to share a passion retro technique. A timeline of your emotions for the year; the aim being to identify peak experiences (and troughs to learn from).