Celebration Grid — The best way to retrospect!
Most often, I see that agile retrospective discussions are dull, boring, energy wasting and at the end just a meeting that happens as a habit — I see people walk away with no absolute value and they often complain.
If you talk to 9 out of 10 teams who do a sprint retrospection at the end of each sprint, they would probably say — “Well, Retro is useful but minimal action taken after the meeting” or some would say something like — “It was a good discussion yet, I am not sure if we will act on anything discussed”.
Also, our retrospectives tend to become the place where the teams discuss the most obvious, non-critical, non-constructive feedback that doesn’t add much value to your team’s growth. I also, observe that most teams are not fully on-boarded into the discussion.
So, I have been investing my time to find out an approach that works greatly — that’s when I came across “Celebration Grid” from Management 3.0 — This is indeed a great way to lead your retrospection. I saw a greater level of engagement and immediate value when I used this first time in one of my retrospectives — Since then, this is been one of the key practices I used in my agile teams.
What is the Celebration Grid?
Many people following agile say “we should celebrate failures“—We tend to focus on success by following a set of standard practices repeatedly — So, you end up following these practices and wont learn any new way around or innovate your practices.
The Celebration Grid is a Management 3.0 practice which demonstrates that failures and successes are both needed for learning and to maximize the understanding of problems. Your failures and successes are both good as long as we learn from them — Celebration Grid emphasis that you must strike a balance between your failures and success— Because, if you succeed all the time, this may tell us that you don’t try challenging implementations or you are just in your comfort zone — on the other hand, if you fail too much, that means, you are trying to achieve things that are too risky, not doable — so, this practice allows you to have a critical look at what you do as a team.
How does it look?
Here is how Celebration Grid from Management 3.0 looks!
What does above Comprehensive diagram tell us?
In your team, you will make mistakes, you will do experiments and you will have a set of agreed practices— If you are to be a healthy team, you must learn from your mistakes and these will potentially contribute towards team’s success — You shall run experiments that will fail or succeed but learn from them — you shall establish practices that will help you to be successful. In above diagram, potential areas to celebrate are in green and those colored in gray and red are where we didn’t learn, or we haven’t had a positive outcome.
When having a review discussion with your team, we should focus on the following 6 areas:
- Practices with a good outcome
- Practices with a bad outcome
- Experiments that succeed
- Experiments that failed
- Mistakes that were lucky
- Mistakes that were real failures
Why Should I use the Celebration Grid?
Inspect and Adapt regularly: Celebration Grid is a great tool to enable critical thinking and team’s engagement to conduct process reviews — retrospectives. Use Celebration Grid to inspect and learn from the past — once you know your lessons, then that provides a solid ground to adapt yourself.
Focus on high performance, not just processes or practices: In our retrospectives, we tend to review the process and practices and yet tend to overlook on the big picture — Celebration grid ensures that you discuss not only practices but also mistakes and experiments that you ran.
And, Celebration Grid enables great discussions: I found that Teams enjoy the discussions and it demands critical thinking — Great facilitation technique to ignite great review discussions.
How Do I Use the Celebration Grid?
Check in [5 minutes]
I am using 5 minutes to brief the Celebration Gird, answer any questions from the team and ensure, everyone is on-boarded for a greater discussion
For Co-located Teams: Draw the Celebration Grid or print it out and hang it on a wall. Gather around the Celebration Grid and ask everyone in the team to come up their learning and paste them on the grid — at this stage, it’s important that you make the purpose clear to the team [Team may focus on the 6 different areas mentioned above].
For Remote Teams: First thing first, I Downloaded the empty Grid from Management 3.0 site and use it as a background in a tool such as Miro or Linoit.
Silent Reflection[10 minutes]:
- Once the team understand what it is and how it works, I ask the team to do a 10 minutes of silent reflection where the team can reflect silently [Team may focus on the 6 different areas mentioned above]
Discussion [40 Minutes]
- In facilitating this, I use one of the following approaches:
- Round Robin: Ask everyone to do their talking and run through their lessons, track them on the board
- 1–2–4 — All Liberation Structure: Read more here.
- As the facilitator, ensure that you help the team to reflect on the lessons effectively — Agree on the action items basing your learning and assign those to the team members [ask for volunteers]
Check Out [10 Minutes]
- Now that you have led a great discussion, wrap up with a high note — hope that we have spent the time really well — in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the session, I usually end up my discussions with the following two questions
- What did you like the most about this session?
- and Can you suggest an improvement for the next session?
All in all following are my takeaways from this great practice!
- The Celebration Grid allows me to have deeper, critical discussion with the team rather than just regular retrospective discussions — and our discussion is focused on high performance.
- It allowed us to focus on experiments, not just mistakes — This emphasizes the difference between just failing and experimenting. This create created clarity about failures.
- Celebration Grid helped the team to understand the right balance between mistakes, experiments and team practices and their connection to team performance.
- Although, teams tend to feel that it’s difficult to understand, gradually, this influenced the team move out of their comfort zone.
- I recommend using an appropriate facilitation techniques such as 1–2–4-All liberating Structure or round robin to structure the discussion.
- Establish the clear goals to achieve during the discussion — I would generally ask the team to pick their top 1–2 learning for each question.
- Gradually, the Celebration Grid helped us to transition the mindset from”let’s not fail” to “Let’s experiment” — this way, we learnt to focus on the outcome and the lessons learnt — If we don’t achieve what we want, at least we have learn our lessons.
- At the end of the discussion, ensure that you come up with clear action items basing your learning and prioritize them — maximum of 3–5 action items for the next sprint would work — ensure to pick up the most crucial, high value items
The Celebration Grid is one of the great practices that I have adopted in my coaching journey and this has helped several team so far and I am sure this will help you and your team to come out of your comfort zone, be critical and learn your lessons faster and in the best way possible — Get into the Celebration Grid.
