Management 3.0: Don’t forget to celebrate learning

When we talk about Agile Teams, we talk about concepts such as to adapt, change, and, above all, continuous improvement, since, if we can agree on something, it is that, without these concepts, agility itself would not exist.

It is very common that the search for improvement opportunities becomes uphill for some teams, without finding the correct focus of their energies. This leads to the following questions: How do you find these opportunities for improvement? How do you motivate teams to proposals for innovation and creativity? How do you to get out of the focus of the usual processes that lead to the same results?

Looking for answers about that, I would like to share with you the following experience:

Months ago being part of a multidisciplinary team, made up of 8 people, among which there were coaches, managers, and leaders working on the creation of training on Agility and software development, whose objective was to become a community of practice. I had the pleasure of accompanying the team in the execution of an online event, the purpose of which was to validate certain theories about the exposed content and to evaluate the public’s reaction to them. This would allow generating new training in the future.

Until then, many activities had been held, but no inspection was made of the impact analysis and their results.

The execution of the project gave the team many experiences and, of course, extensive and enriching feedback, reactions, and experiences of the participants. The interesting thing about this feedback is that it should become an input that helps to design the next actions.

That is how I set out to find a way to find results, show those opportunities for improvement, those keys to innovation in future events. I needed a tool, to be able to focus on what had happened, so as not only to observe the feedback and experience of the event but also how those results affected the team and in what way it could provide value for future events.

This time I thought about using Celebration Grids. I invite you to learn more about Celebration Grids at the following link: https://management30.com/practice/celebration-grids/.

Why Celebration Grids?

The Celebration Grids technique is a visual way of presenting the result of an experiment, whether it was successful or not. It shows us where we can celebrate the good practices that result from a positive outcome and where we can learn something from our failures. It helps teams not only with an inspection and awareness of the outcome of what they experience but also with the design and planning of future experiments.

Features that clearly match what my team needed.

Celebration Grids in Action

The first challenge about the dynamic was its preparation. Our team worked 100% on remote, so online visual tools were the key.

I shared with Team Celebration Board on Miró App, based on templates proposed by Management 3.0, next step I prepared the board and the dynamics following the following steps:

1. Explanation of the board:

The Celebration Grids board visually shows we contemplate the result of the experiments or actions carried out by a group, collecting both the successes and the failures.

As a first point we share the meaning of each column:

Errors: This column refers to actions that we must stop taking because they tend to lead to failure, although on some occasions they may have worked for us.

Experiments: In this column, we will write the actions that we have implemented without knowing in advance if they will have a successful result or not. Whether the result is positive or negative, with experiments you always learn.

Practices: It refers to practices for which the results are already known. Sometimes they can fail, but if we do them correctly they usually lead to success.

2. Each team member wrote her contributions on sticky notes, placing them in the colored grids:

Red: Practices or actions that did not work and therefore we should not repeat.

Green: Practices or actions that we must maintain and repeat in the future because they lead us to success and promote learning.

Gray: This area represents the neutrality of our practices or actions, that is, they did not bring learning or success.

3. We shared with the team individual reflections, from the visualization of the result of the dynamics, which served as the basis for the debate. The ultimate goal was to reach a consensus in which to decide which practices will continue to be done and which experiments will be carried out.

4. We complete the last row, which shows us the learning (in my opinion the most important section), where we reflect on how learning is greater when we run experiments of which it is not known for sure what the result is, and less is learned when practices or mistakes are made for which we know the result in advance.

5. Once we had the results, in order to close our dynamics, new experiments were proposed, so that the results lead us to future actions and put continuous improvement in motion.

What did we learn?

As a facilitator, I learned that continuous improvement is not only created by reflecting on good practices and opportunities for improvement, but by focusing on the learning that the team takes and how it helps future experiments.

As teams we learned to generate a space of trust, focusing the analysis on a particular experiment, where we could interpret behaviors and results, from the perspective of each member.

Also being able to design the next actions, identifying good practices and how to improve them.

In my next experiment, I will invite the team to use a different format when designing experiments, to investigate or detail what they want to achieve, proposing a timeline in which they aspire to complete the actions.

It would change the dynamics a bit, comparing previous actions with current ones, giving rise to being able to count the learning of each previous action, asking what would be the criteria that the team would use to verify that it is finished

and it was a success.

After having one more experiment, we will make an inspection regarding the number of experiments, and if they are granting the learning that we had as an expectation.

Celebration Grids, managed to focus on giving the necessary visibility of the impact and successes that the team had in its development of topics, helped to have a general overview of the direction that the new training should take and the focus that they should have.

Conclusion

Celebration Grids raises an interesting concept focused on learning, not only on the success of good practices but also on learning from mistakes and the search for innovation.

The advice always remembers that the column in the center “experiments” is where your team will learn the most, along with the mistakes that sometimes end up being successful and the good practices that fail. Therefore, always motivate your teams to experiment, be creative and learn new practices, regardless of the result, as they will always learn something.

Finally, I invite you to experiment using Celebration Grids, in search of a retrospective focused on learning and continuous improvement.