Thursday 2 May 2013

Intention to change: "I will make something happen"

I have not spent much time designing this, at least not on purpose. It sort of emerged during a busy week when I was asked to facilitate a team's retrospective and I had little or no time to prepare.

What I wanted to get through to people was that it might be more beneficial if they rephrased their findings and statements to show intention to change and ownership of that intention. To begin with I asked the team to generate ideas and thoughts while always beginning their sentences with one of the following:
1. I will make some change because ...
2. something makes me frustrated
3. something makes me confused

And I suggested that everyone takes 5-10 minutes to make some notes in those lines. Once people looked like they've almost finished I asked them to tell everyone about the ideas falling under number 3 and I asked for explanation and suggested that we all attempt to turn these sentences into 'intention to change' statements. If the team felt that an idea must be auctioned we kept the card on the board.

Once we exhausted the number 3 type of items we moved to number 2 and tried the same approach: talking about each idea and trying to turn it into an intention to change statement. They looked like this:
"I will make the CI build take less time".

If the team agreed that an item must be resolved then we kept the item on the board and whoever suggested the idea (or another volunteer ) signed up to action it.

And finally we reviewed the type 1 items most of which already followed the 'intention to change' format. Those that weren't we also rephrased accordingly.
Finally some items which most people didn't agree with or nobody cared enough to action were removed from the board.

The result of about an hour long meet up was over 10 actionable ideas with their owners and all I the intentional change format. It is only 2 days after the retrospective and almost half of the items have already been auctioned. And yes the feedback from the team was positive.

I hope someone makes use if this :)