Coaching For Flow
Building the foundations for teams to exceed expectation
In my experience, there are two characteristics to a successful team reflection session:
- The team learns something new about themselves
- The team did not expect to learn that thing.
In their most recent retrospective, a software development team I coach was interrogating their reflection that they are communicating well, and what factors might be influencing this. The team switches between the Scrum and Kanban frameworks depending on what is required of them. Their current use of Kanban means there is not a prescription for a dedicated time set aside for planning, and it’s for the team to work out the best way to collaborate according to the work they are doing. When asked, they described their system as ‘short, frequent and focussed’ conversations.
As an aside, this appears to be discouraged by the Scrum Guide, which offers planning, review, retrospectives, and daily scrums as all of the meetings a team needs:
“Events are used in Scrum to create regularity and to minimize the need for meetings not defined in Scrum. Optimally, all events are held at the same time and place to reduce complexity.”
