Agile Retrospectives

3.5 Taking Your Skills to the Next Level

If you enjoy helping groups think together, increase your skills as a facilitator and augment your toolbox. Consider deepening your skills in these areas:

• Working with activities. There’s an art to developing, introducing, and debriefing activities and simulations to help people think and learn together. In addition to using activities in retrospectives, using activities and simulations is helpful if coaching, teaching, or training is part of your job.

• Helping groups reach decisions. There’s a huge body of knowledge related to how people really make decisions (it’s not entirely by logic, by the way). You can improve the quality of decision making in your group by knowing what decision process fits the situation and how to help the group converge on a decision.

• Understanding and managing group dynamics. Learning about people and people in groups is a lifelong study. Your skills in this area will help you build and nurture high-performing groups as well as run a darn good retrospective.

• Increasing self-awareness. Self-awareness is the foundation of personal effectiveness. You can’t go wrong learning more about yourself and learning how you respond under stress. Gaining awareness of habitual patterns is the first step to being able to choose an appropriate response rather than simply reacting.

• Creating and using flip charts. Don’t use any more of those scribbled flip charts that no one can read from more than a foot away! ...