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SessId023Have you ever wondered why some things don't change? That's because we keep doing some things the same way. And why do we do that? Because the demands of our jobs cause us to push onto the next project without pausing to reflect on the work we've just completed. Departmental retrospectives are a way to pause and learn from experiences, both good and bad. Anyone who leads work groups will want to attend this session and participate in a demonstration of a facilitated process to access the wisdom of the group and apply learnings to the work ahead. (Brian Pioreck, Johanna Rothman) Applications: Transferring technologies across projects; Creating a safe environment; Building an effective software development culture; Enhancing your facilitation skills; Growing the learning organization; Moving from reactive to anticipating culture; Identifying effective and ineffective patterns; Using the combined brainpower to analyze complex systems; Improving through retrospectives. Brian, can Partner be Two Partners? And can participants be partners? We, PatSciacca and NynkeFokma feel like jumping in with you. We worked together (with Dan Starr) on setting up and rolling out Retrospective processes in Lucent. --NynkeFokma Pat and Nynke, I'll speak for me, and I suspect Brian will agree :-) I'd love to hear what you folks have to say. Anything you want to share here? -- Johanna Hi Johanna! I hope Pat will be with us shortly (busy and password recovery). The way I saw it was that we all three spent most of our time thinking about and trying out ways that can create feelings of safety for techies (like me). For me, the experience of developing and rolling out this service was like hunting paths that could enable me and could possibly be useful for others too, to express things without angering my great protectors, the Dragons ... Management may feel responsible for things they had no control over, and can never have control over. I discovered that doing a couple of one-on-ones before the group meeting, and discussing the early outcomes with management beforehand, can help. They can be defensive to me (that's okay, some real learning starts with the pain), without interrupting the group meeting. With a couple of days between the two, it may even get management to come out and play, helping me facilitate participants and actually having a positive effect on the meeting and afterwards in supporting some actual problem solving. From my perspective, Pat took more of an OD approach and she seemed to see much bigger pictures than I did (both in organizational effects of a retrospective, as in what it takes to roll them out effectively). And that was not instead of the empathic attempts, that was an AND! At the time, I was new to this game. I learned loads from facilitating retrospectives, for facilitation and for organizational development. I also think it is one of the hardest things I ever did (dare). Nynke, I can only imagine a partner/participant who has been doing these type of retrospectives enriching the workshop. I have seen some powerful results come from these sessions. I am excited to hear more about your experiences. Brian I wonder if some background might help here. Departmental retrospectives came about as a way of creating a line of sight between organizational goals and the actual work being sponsored in departments or functional groups. Too often employees are handed laminated cards with value/mission statements to put in their wallets without action or communication to back it up. Also, these statements on these laminated cards do not relate to the work that must be done today. Today's work always seems to get in the way of tomorrow's improvement. Yet, when these value/mission statements were being developed at the executive retreat, corporate management was sincere. The strategy and goals that flow from them are vital to the company's success. They may even spawn quality departments and process improvement programs. Yet somehow only a small amount of what is needed gets through to what is getting done. So this technique helps to give us visibility into what is getting done and whether what is getting done is what is needed. It operates on all three levels of congruence (self, other, and context) and attempts to reveal the how this is playing out in the organization. With this awareness, people can decide what parts belong to them and what their choices are. They can make decisions about what actions to take and publicly communicate them. When they provide an example by following through, other departments can use this model for their own work. Then, one person at a time, department by department, an organization can begin to manage change. --Brian Notes from the session: Departmental Retrospective Objectives
-- JohannaRothman and BrianPioreck Return to NewSessionDescriptions
Updated: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 |
