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Getting Real About Your Values – The Values Retrospective

November 20, 2017

Bringing values down to earth

Values and principles can often seem lofty and intangible, so many agile practitioners prefer to focus on tools and practices. That's understandable but unfortunate. Values and principles have the potential to provide us with clarity and guidance that transcends what practices and frameworks can achieve. Ideally, part of your empirical inspection and adaptation process should explore whether you are living by your values and principles. To accomplish that, you can try a value-based retrospective.

 

Values-based Retrospective - The TL;DR (Too long; Didn't Read) version:

Create a matrix with your values as rows, and some classic retro categories, such as plus or delta, as columns. Then run a "generate insights" activity in which you try to identify what you're doing that upholds a value or contradicts it and could be improved. Afterwards,, continue the retrospective as usual by deciding what to focus on,identifyingo the root cause,devisingh experiment,s, and committing to some change.

 

The Value of a Values-based Retrospective

 

This can help in a couple of ways:

  • Refresh the team's recollection and understanding of the values/principles and their importance
  • Help you identify espoused values that you need to work on, either a bit or a lot.
  • Celebrate some values that align with your actual behavior.
  • Identify impediments that are blocking you from behaving in a way that's aligned with your espoused values.

 

Choosing Values to Focus On

One question you should probably ask is, "What values should I use?"

 

Regardless of the set of values you choose, make sure you understand the value of each one. E.g., how does the Scrum value "Courage" benefit you as a team? Why is it required to achieve high performance? This can serve as a warm-up activity for the retrospective, where each person attempts to articulate their perspective and then shares their notes.

Improve Collaboratively Using Models

You can also use this retrospective style to introduce sets of values as models to examine while striving to improve. What I mean by that is you could run a retrospective using a particular set of values, even if they're not formally your values. For example, even if you're not doing Scrum, running a retrospective using the Scrum Values would be educational, would probably inspire some interesting discussions, and drive some practical experiments.

In summary, running a values-based retrospective can be a great way to run a different style of retrospectives - one that is, on the one hand, focusing on the roots of what we're trying to do and, on the other hand, grounded in our actual behaviors and what to do about them.


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