A 20-year Agile retrospective: What kind of game is that?
By: Nick Argall
Tags: Agile Retrospective, Agile, Work, Organization Design

A 20-year Agile retrospective: What kind of game is that?

This article applies the Know Your Game methodology to the question of “How do we conduct a 20-year retrospective for the Agile movement?”

Photo by Zelenskaya via Shutterstock

Update

After initial publication, this document has been welcomed for review by the folks planning Agile Retrospective 20. If you would like to take part in planning Agile Retrospective 20, please visit the project master document and make the comments and changes you would like to see.

Background

The Agile movement began at the turn of the 21st century, as senior software developers became increasingly frustrated with management practices which they perceived to be harming their productivity. The creation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 is the most prominent landmark moment in the history of this movement. Since then, a number of guides on how to achieve agility and how to be Agile have been written. Controversies have also arisen, including debates about “Agile vs agility”, concerns that the movement has lost its way, disagreements about methods. There have been successes and failures, achievements and disappointments.

One of the main traditions in the Agile movement is the retrospective, a practice of stopping work after a period of time to look back and ask “What happened? Where are we? How did we get here?” Things have definitely happened in the last 20 years, and there’s a good chance that we can learn something by examining that time period. Given the many thousands of practitioners and stakeholders involved, practices optimized for teams of around 7 are unlikely to cope with the scale of the exercise.

Know Your Game is a methodology I developed in order to clarify structural issues in human organized activity. The idea is to apply the principles of game design to serious activities, on the principle that when an activity is inherently rewarding, people do a better job. Knowing your game (as opposed to setting it up, or playing it) is about seeing the constraints clearly and establishing a vision for how the game will be designed and played.

With luck, this document will contribute to a minimum viable agreement that can be used to govern the retrospective. If things don’t go brilliantly, it’s an example of how Know Your Game can be used to understand a work structure.

Desire

What is the activity that we are trying to design? It’s to look at what has happened and understand it. What should our structure enable? What should it protect us from?

Brilliance Line

It would be brilliant if we all walked away from this exercise with a renewed sense of purpose and vigor. With a clear and united understanding of where we are, how we got here, and a sense of what our goals for the future should be.

Qualifying Line

If we invested a bunch of time and energy into this retrospective and didn’t learn anything, then we never really played properly.

Risk

Every well-designed game features an intentional risk (which adds excitement that feeds our desire), and usually features a number of inevitable risks (which add excitement of a less enjoyable sort).

Intentional risk

The gap between the qualifying line and the brilliance line is wide enough that this is a good intentional risk. We should set out to learn something, bearing in mind that the best outcome will be a clear and shared understanding.

Inevitable risks

Egos and livelihoods are at stake if someone is blamed for an adverse outcome, while fame (probably not much fortune) is available to those who provide remarkable insights and visibly advance the state of the art. All of the usual problems of large groups,multi-organization efforts, multi-timezone efforts, and multi-disciplinary efforts apply.

Players

Most agile practitioners are software engineers, whose favourite game is “Let’s build a coherent whole.” They have a strong interest in constructing social environments through rules established by consent (much of the work done by the Agile movement is the design of these types of rules), and a tendency to reject hierarchy and the trappings of hierarchy. Once they have consented to a rule, they tend to comply consistently. Compliance with rules perceived as badly designed or illegitimate tends to be very poor. They value explicit discussion, and tend to be suspicious of anything resembling emotional manipulation.

No organizational players have been identified at this time. The major organizational players are likely to take an interest and demand participation if the effort is succeeding.

Technologies currently in play include Facebook groups and the Medium blogging platform. A proliferation of technologies is likely, given the inclinations of the human players.

Structure

The fundamental underlying structure is “An ecosystem of concepts and perceptions.”

Nobody is getting paid, and the Agile movement does not have a clear individual leader. Therefore, any attempt to impose a structure without genuine cooperation will fail. Due to the high proportion of builders among the players, structures must be negotiable and modifiable. No single structure can be expected to satisfy all: the game as a whole will result in an ecosystem of structures, the goal should be productive coexistence.

However, if the people who proposed this retrospective are treated as legitimate authorities for the purpose of conducting a retrospective for the benefit of participants, it becomes possible to establish boundaries and to consolidate on a specific structure. It may be helpful to refrain from publicizing the specific structures unless they have strong curation/moderation in place.

The following structures might be viable (noting that many combinations and permutations are possible):

‘Vote with your feet’ pattern

The volunteer nature of the effort and unpredictability of rewards strongly indicates the ‘vote with your feet’ pattern, where players choose activities and structures for themselves, without any requirement to justify their decisions.

Planned conference

A group may choose to curate a planned conference. This creates an up-front burden on curators and presenters that is hopefully offset by an increased ability to demonstrate the value of the event before attending. Time constraints add focus. May exclude some participants due to timezone/travel requirements.

Un(planned) conference

Un-conferences have an inherent appeal to the anti-hierarchy sentiment in the Agile community. Charisma on the day has a greater impact than in a planned conference. (Shy presenters may miss out, despite having valuable contributions to make.) Use of an un-conference structure (a plan that does not specify content) will prevent chaos.

Curated written conversation

Establishment of a journal (presumably a relatively informal one) allows for the amplification of shy voices and filters out a range of contributions. Confidence in the editors would be critical to the success of such a structure. This would be the slowest structure.

Moderated written conversation

Moderation after the fact strongly decreases the workload involved in curation, and provides opportunities to fringe opinions that might not be given in a curated conversation. Confidence in the moderators would be important to this structure.

Unmoderated written conversation

Rules for a written conversation might be enough to provide sufficiently orderly conversation, without empowering a specific group to enforce those rules. This would require a high level of cooperation with the rules in order to remain focused.

Recognition

The following activities should be explicitly recognized as valuable in this game:

Providing facts that facilitate understanding

Providing insight or analysis that facilitates understanding

Offering perspectives that reconcile conflicting facts, insights, or analyses

Recognizing players for any activity on this list

Any effort to set targets or metrics for these activities has a strong likelihood of backfiring, and is unlikely to produce a significant benefit.

Coaching

Informal offers of coaching will be inevitable, and are likely to offer value to the participants in the coaching relationship. A formal coaching structure is unlikely to succeed, given the nature of the movement. Lack of a formal coaching structure will increase the anxiety levels of the players. A focus on recognition can offset the anxiety increase.

Promotion

Many players will want to contribute visions for the future, alternative visions for Agile/agility, and plans to address problems. These contributions should be recognized as being contributions to a different game, and judgements will need to be made about whether these contributions can be made in the same playing field as the retrospective.

Applying the methodology to the problem

If Know Your Game has succeeded, it has presented a coherent perspective on “What’s going on when we try to do this retrospective?” And the next step is to ask some questions of the key stakeholders:

Is this a fair and accurate statement of the design question, the strategic constraints, and the strategic options?

Is there an option that stands out as preferable?

Are we ready to start building something? If not, why not?

If you’re interested in the Agile/agility retrospective, or in other applications of this methodology, I’d love to hear from you.