Applying Agile to Life: Taking Retrospectives outside the Workplace

I regularly tell people that I view agility as a mindset rather than frameworks, practices, ceremonies, or roles. Consequently, I believe that a lot of what agile teams do can be used effectively outside software development, and even outside the typical business organization.

My company’s agile practices group facilitates retrospectives not just with development teams, but also with the people team, UX research, customer delivery and implementation, and recruiting, just to name a few departments.

With that in mind, I recently had an idea to try something new. Over the New Year's Eve weekend, my wife, daughter, and I spent a few days with my parents and my brother’s family (wife, son, and daughter). On day one, I asked my family members what they thought about having a retrospective at the end of our time together. Because most of them didn't know what a retrospective was, I briefly explained the concept, purpose, and execution. Everyone was on board with trying it out.

The idea had come to me after hosting family members at my house for a weekend earlier in the year. As someone who is always thinking about continuous improvement, I had noticed a few things that could have made the weekend better for us all. My wife and I had a quick retrospective and shared ideas about what we liked and what could have been done differently, like me helping more with the dishes. It made me realize how beneficial a retrospective could be outside my work context, which convinced me to try it out at the next opportunity.

On the last day of New Year’s Eve weekend, I gathered everyone together in the family room. The group of eight ranged in age from seven to sixty-four. I started by asking who had taken part in a retrospective before. My brother, who is a fellow agile coach, and my wife had, but it was interesting to find out that my eleven-year-old nephew had participated in one at school, too. I then explained at a high level the purpose of retrospectives—how we would collect the data, the discussions we would have to dig deeper into topics, and what we would try to achieve as an output.

Next, I created two columns on cabinet doors by placing stickies up high with the words “What went well?” on one and “What could be improved?” on the other. Earlier in the day I had populated some stickies with my thoughts about the weekend, so I put them on the cabinet as examples to ensure everyone had a shared understanding of what to do. I gave some brief context to each of my stickies, asked if anyone had questions, and then put ten minutes on the timer to allow people to capture their ideas on their stickies.

After time was up, everyone added their stickies to the cabinet doors and gave a brief explanation of their thoughts. Occasionally someone would ask for clarification. As the stickies were placed on the cabinets, we grouped similar themes so we could easily tell what were hot topics to dive into.

We had some great discussions. At times it was funny and other times it got a bit emotional. There were some valuable insights and recommendations. People volunteered to take on actions and captured them on sticky notes so they could remember to follow up.

There were some great improvements we suggested:

• We found that some people want to get out of the house more, so a couple of us took on action items to investigate activities for next year (museums, shopping, go to a movie, etc.)
• My nephew said he didn’t want to go to an Italian restaurant again for New Year’s Eve dinner because we’ve done that two years in a row. He also said that the long table at dinner wasn’t great for communication because it was hard for people at the ends to talk to one another. So next year we’ll be eating at a round table not in an Italian restaurant
• Some were not interested in the same old board games, so one person took the action to review the game cabinet, and others will bring games from their houses
• Multiple people thought it was too cold outside, so we are considering going to Mexico next year!
• My niece even said the toilet paper feels like sandpaper and they need to have softer toilet paper. Someone else who lives in the house agreed! Despite living in the same house and using the same toilet paper, they had never discussed it

When I originally proposed the idea, I wasn’t sure what to expect; it seemed like it might be a bit silly. But everyone was engaged and had fun with the retrospective, and we came away with some great action items for improving our times together— and our next gathering will be better because of it.

This real-world example just demonstrates the universal power of retrospectives. How have you incorporated agility into your life outside the workplace?