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Example: The Way Things Are

Are we asking the right questions?

IT Corp’s back-end development team consists of Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave and Eve. They have agreed to start working with psychological safety, in the hopes that it can help their team grow and develop even better architecture solutions in the future. They have chosen to adopt the tool “The Way Things Are”, and have decided to conduct it at the start of their bi-weekly retrospective meeting. In the meeting, the tool is presented by Dave, who asks if anyone has a specific activity from the list that they would like to work with today. It’s a monday morning, and the team is still working on their first cup of coffee, so after a bit of silence, Dave says: “Okay, we’ll roll for it!”. Dave picks up some dice, and matches the roll to the team’s list of activities. Dave exclaims: “Okay, we’ll talk about our daily standup today!”. Each team member is given two post-its, and given 5 minutes to write down the best and the worst thing about how the team’s daily standup meeting is conducted. The five minutes pass, and Dave initiates a round-table starting with Alice. Alice says: “I really like that we get to hear from everyone in the team, and that everyone participates every day. However, I sometimes feel that our standups can be a little robotic, and that people just rattle off answers to the three questions we use.” Some nodding occurs around the table. Bob takes his turn: “I think we are quite good at discovering the need for follow-up meetings during on the standup. I think that we sometimes spend too much time on the standup, however.” The roundtable continues around the table. When everyone has spoken, Dave asks: “Do we see any re-occurring themes?”. Eve points out that most of the time spent, and most of the robotic feel of the standup, come from feeling like you have to answer the three pre-selected questions, rather than just saying what you think is important. The team agrees, and decides to try a week of standups getting rid of the three questions, and instead only ask one: “What would you like to share with the team about your work today?”, emphasizing that the sharing should still take inspiration from the three questions.The team was using the common three questions for daily standups:

  1. What did you do yesterday?
  2. What will you do today?
  3. Are there any impediments in your way?