Sunday, May 12, 2013

Visualizing Retrospective Priorities

We tried a new retrospective prioritization/voting technique this week that worked really well. After we had generated and discussed all of our ideas for improvement, it was clear to me that there were several excellent ideas and it would be hard to use our regular voting technique to single out one or two. In fact, it seemed clear that there were several ideas that should all be done and were somewhat related. I decided to try a technique in order to visualize the priorities, grouping, and weighting of the ideas.

I drew a line on the whiteboard from the bottom right to the top left and put all the ideas we had generated in the middle of the board. I then asked the team to approach the board and move the items they believed would have the most impact to the top left and the least impact to the bottom right. Yes, I was a little worried about the priming effect of having everyone voting together but I decided to ignore my own advice this time.

After the post-it notes on the board 'settled into position', we held another brief discussion to confirm the position of the ideas. It was clear that there were several high impact ideas on the board that needed to be implemented right away and some interesting clusters formed at the top left. The position of the post-it notes also visibly identified the ideas that the team thought would have a lower impact and could be dealt with another time.
The final confirmation that this visualization of priorities was effective came later that day - the team met and started implementing their ideas.

P.S. Yet again the 'take it to the team' approach resulted in a better solution than the ones I had envisioned prior to the retrospective. #TeamGenius


Saturday, May 4, 2013

Q: Why Silence? A: Priming.

I'm a big fan of using silent brainstorming in order to generate ideas as individuals before processing those ideas as a group. "Priming" is yet another reason why using silence is important.

System 1 & System 2.
(Not to be confused with Thing 1 and Thing 2)
I'm currently reading Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" - a behavioural psychology and economics book that describes his research on how our mind thinks. In the book, Kahneman describes the two systems that make up how we think. System one is the unconscious, fast, intuitive, relational thinker. System two is the conscious, slower, lazier, and more logical thinker. For example, when I ask you what 2+2 is, system one jumps in and gives you the answer of 4. When I ask you what 453 * 23 is, system two jumps in to help you calculate the answer.

One of the experiments that Kahneman describes demonstrates how you can 'prime' system one and influence its answers. The experiment asked people to look at one word and then fill in the blank in a subsequent incomplete word. The first word they were shown was either "Eat" or "Wash" and the second incomplete word was "So_p". When shown "Eat", system one's relational thinking kicked in and people more often said "Soup" for the second word. On the other hand, when shown "Wash", system one more often produced the related word "Soap". Showing the first word to the participants 'primed' system one and influenced it to think of a second word that was related to the first.

So, if you start a brainstorming meeting with "What can we do better? My idea is [X].", you have now primed people to think about [X]. However, if you let people generate ideas on their own first you will start with a larger base of ideas to work with. Once people have written down their own ideas [X,Y,Z], saying those ideas out loud will allow system one to find relational words on the whole set rather than just one idea.

Generate ideas in silence, process the ideas out loud.

References:
- Daniel Kahneman's Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Slides and video from my related talk: The Silence of Agile