Some weeks ago I challenged teams to rotate the organization of Retrospectives among Team members. These are teams that don’t have assigned Scrum Masters, they have Team leaders.
My vision: Share responsibility, tasks and take the chance to learn about it a bit more.
My arguments:
1. While being an organizer, one will intuitively search for and read more about retrospectives.
2. Healthy competition: while being the organizer, one will try to do the best exercises ever (so they will educated themselves while doing that).
3. Last but not least, once you have been an organizer you will respect the next organizers cause you’ll learn that it’s not easy to facilitate a retrospective.
They accepted the challenge.
So one of this days , while drinking my coffee, a Scrummie (aka scrum team member) asked me if I could help out on organizing the retrospective for the next week. And this is where I want to get, how interesting my conversations with people turn out to be..cause I always learn something new..or just have these epiphanies… or just pretty damn good stuff to blog about.
…
[Scrummie]- “You know, just listen out my ideas for exercises and tell me what you think about them ..it’s my first time doing this”
[Me] – ” sure! .. great that you are taking care of it this time”
[Scrummie]- “Yes, I wanted to give it a try..and I’m reading a lot about it, already read the first chapters on Agile retrospectives book… but still.. you know..it all looked silly and simple, but now that I’m digging in I’m having some doubts”
[Me] -” hum… ok… that’s good. :) Means you’re thinking about the stuff your reading, and you’re trying to find meaning. So, what are your doubts?”
[Scrummie]- ” well… I read a lot about inspect& adapt but then I recall all other retros..and all we do is inspect&adapt working items..”
[Me] – “that isn’t enough isn’t it? I mean if you want to stop being a group of individuals and start being a team..”
[Scrummie]- ” Exactly! we should start discussing other stuff.. like how to improve as a team..relations ”
…. this talk went for a long time…
Finally I heard something like ” Nowadays IQ isn’t as important as EQ, isn’t it?”
Can you imagine how proud I am for all the battles we’ve had together, all suffering and pain while trying to save our humanity at work..
Change? No! we don’t need to change! We just need to be as human and kind and friendly and trusty as we are outside our offices… It’s true: Intellectual quotient is not as important as Emotional quotient nowadays.
SCRUMPLICITY 