Celebrating our learnings

Hello everyone! It’s time to celebrate! What are we celebrating? Anything we learned today! Today I want to talk about celebrating and learning with the celebration grid. Anyone who’s in the agile software development world has heard that we need to fail quickly, it is good to fail so we can learn as much as possible, and that’s partially true, we need safe spaces to for failure and that can indeed lead to us learning something new. But that will happen only we have good hypotheses with a good and structured test (such as the lean experiment canvas from Shiftup) so we can have validated learning, that is, learning something based on what we were testing, that is the correct way of doing it, just as Eric Ries described.

The Celebration Grid is all about validated learning. In it, we have three main fields for “behavior”, that is, what we were doing to begin with, we can use good practices, experiments or something that is “faded” to fail, combing with these we have the “success” and “failure” options. We understand that we can succeed or fail at any of the possible behaviors. Finally, we have the learning curve, where we “measure” how much we can learn from each behavior, the idea behind it is quite simple, we learn the most when we are experimenting, it doesn’t matter if the experiment was a success or failed, when we use good practices we have less room for learning, given they are more likely to succeed anyway, and if we are doing something we can see was “meant” to fail, we also have little room for learning.

I’ve used this one quite recently, in December 2022 my team was a bit unhappy with Scrum, we’ve never done it by the book, but we were starting to be way too flexible with it, so I did a workshop about Agile, Scrum, Scumban and Kanban and they decided to try a more “kanbanistic” approach to our processes, we started in January 2023, we also did a lot of experimenting with other things after that. As the first quarter was coming to an end, I thought it would be nice for us to reflect on what we learned. It was the perfect time to use the Celebration Grid.

It was a straightforward use of the Celebration Grid; I explained the idea behind it and gave them sometime to fill it with post-its. After that I read some of the post-its and asked for volunteers to explain their own or comment about some other post-it, they liked, it was a calm and fruitful conversation, we ended up agreeing that we learned a lot, experimented a lot and had some different views on somethings.

Truth be told, I’ve tried sometimes to create a culture where we would always fill up a Celebration Grid that’s fixed on our Miro board, as a way of continuous improvement and learning, but I could never get that properly going, so for it to be so successful during our retrospective made me really happy! I’ve learned that it takes some time (minutes, but focused minutes, and that makes a big difference) to accurately fill up a Celebration Grid and we should always discuss the post-its we place in it, maybe that’s why I could never get it going as something recurrent, where we would fill it by ourselves and maybe discuss it later with someone. However, I’m still excited to try new ways of using it!

#management30 #learning