Agile Retrospectives

The approaching and start of a new year often triggers reflection and dreaming. Looking back at what happened during the last year, setting ambitions for the next. A former colleague of mine often said that it is our bad experiences that create our strongest desires for the future. That we at least are sure of that we don’t want that to happen again. However, our tendency to focus on trouble and problems is not necessarily always productive. We also need to remember the good, in order to make more of that happen. Happiness is not the equivalent of lack of unhappiness.

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen have combined the ideas behind agile software development with appreciative inquiry to a new way of doing Lessons Learned sessions. They call it “Agile Retrospectives”. Interested? Check out this brief and witty text, look at the informative and funny video or buy the book. I believe that this way of doing reoccurring formative (e)valuations of projects where you look at successes as well as challenges, but also document ideas and make sure that good contributions are recognised can create a permanent change in the organisation towards a more constructive approach in general. Creating what Gervase Bushe calls a transformational change.

Together with my research colleagues at the IT University and Ericsson I am looking into doing research in this direction. We will develop a Lessons Learned-tool that incorporates some of the ideas described above. The trick will be to also combine it with strength-based perspective while doing the research as well, using what I learned from being a guest editor for the special AI Practitioner issue on appreciative inquiry and research. An agile retrospective on the work on agile retrospectives. It’s all about appreciating recursion…