The Celebration Grid — A Tool to Nurture Creativity and Innovation in Teams

Introduction:

?“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and 
expecting a different result.”?- Albert Einstein        

What should we celebrate??Former management practices had no lenience for failure and focused only on honoring successes.?Lately, though, the pendulum has been swinging in the opposite direction, wanting people to understand that it is ok to fail and to celebrate their failures. People will say “Fail Fast”.?We really need to understand the full intent here though because it’s not that we want to concentrate on failure, but more on learning. A better and more accurate phrase would be “Fail Fast to Learn”.?After all, failing without learning really provides no benefit.

If we do the same thing over and over again and continue to fail this is not beneficial and we have certainly not learned anything.?Albert Einstein dubbed this “the definition of insanity”. We can be successful by following standard practice, but again we have not learned anything since the successful outcome was expected.?So these are examples of when we have failed and succeeded, but have not learned. We can sometimes, however, learn from failure. We can also learn when a standard practice that has led to much success in the past then suddenly fails us and becomes obsolete. These types of learning occur but are certainly less likely.

Often in our day-to-day business, we are too focused on doing our work and solving problems, not realizing the positive things that happen and the learnings we achieve. The Celebration Grid is one great tool that helps to make those things and learnings transparent. It is a tool from Management 3.0 and very helpful when used within the continuous improvement cycle. It not only uncovers areas for improvement but also highlights another aspect. While focusing on learning and good practices the Celebration Grid indeed reveals aspects of our daily business worth celebrating. Thus, it combines improvement, celebration, and learning.?

Why should you read this article?

• Do you want to simply know what is Celebration Grid practice from Management 3.0?
• Are you inquisitive to know how to incrementally cultivate an environment that allows you/your team to experiment with new ideas regardless the outcome at the same time focused on learning?
• Do you want to know how to measure your team’s behavior for Mistakes, Experiments, and Practices against the respective outcome?
• Are you planning to experiment with Celebration Grid with your team but wondering how to maneuver your energy in a step-by-step pattern?
• How to interpret data points/trends coming out post-implementation of this practice and use it towards making meetings/workshops/training the most engaging one?
• Do you want to explore/know my experience and learnings while experimenting celebration grid at scale?
• Lastly, how does this practice add value at different levels (In my case, Team & Program (Agile Release Train (ART)) level)?

If your answer is “Yes” for any of the above-mentioned questions, then this article may be of your help.

What is Celebration Grid?

Jurgen Appelo, the author of books like “How to Change the World” and “Management 3.0”, affirms that we learn the most when we can’t predict whether our experiments will lead to good or bad outcomes. In other words, he believes that failure and success are both needed for learning. In his books “#Workout” and “Managing for Happiness”, he proposes that we should celebrate learning, not success or failure, to maximize the understanding of our problems. And he supposes that the only way to do it is by experiencing.

?One of the tools created by him that I like to use as a visual way to present the outcome of an experiment, whether that experiment succeeded or failed, is the Celebration Grid. This grid shows us where we can celebrate the good practices, which result from a positive outcome and where we learned something from our failures.

?The Celebration Grid is a Management 3.0 practice. It illustrates that failure and success are both needed for learning and to maximize the understanding of problems. By using this practice teams can focus on learnings regardless of the outcome: where we can celebrate the good practices, which result from a positive outcome, and where we learned something from our failures. The purpose of the celebration grid is to encourage team members to celebrate what they have learned. It helps teams to be more creative and productive in a very visual way. It is a Management 3.0 practice pioneered by Jurgen Appelo.

?The following image shows the Management 3.0 Celebration Grid:

This colored image helps us to understand better the grid. The green parts are potential celebration areas (C, B, and E) and are called the celebration zone:

• Region C: good practices usually lead to success. That’s why we have them.
• Region B: we run experiments when we don’t know if we will succeed.
• Region E: with all experiments, there is a good chance of failing.

The other areas colored gray and red in color are where we didn’t learn, or have a positive outcome. Their meanings are:

• Region F: although sometimes, good practices can fail
• Region D: we avoid mistakes (bad practices) because they often lead to failure.
• Region A: although sometimes, mistakes surprise us with unexpected success.

Why have I decided to use this practice?

I have below top six motives to opt celebration grid:

• Firstly, by design, the celebration grid accentuates all the positive aspects that are happening in the team. It helps the team to focus on the different experiments they execute, practices we were doing even without realizing it worth cherishing and applauding. We also cultured that the mistakes recorded in each sprint drop consistently as any mistakes made are automatic get converted into learning opportunities and become experiments.
• Secondly, over the period I have observed that teams love running experiments and becoming better, faster, and happier. We started to run more experiments, leading to more celebrations of learning, further reinforcing this positive loop.
• Thirdly, I witnessed that incrementally team’s culture gets transformed positively. Even if we do not have a safe-to-fail environment in the team initially, using the grid consistently led to one. We learned to be vulnerable with each other, open to the possibility of failure, and not be risk-averse, creating the culture needed to experiment and innovate more.
• Forth, what the team selects to celebrate will set the team’s culture and determine whether they will be innovative. We generally classify tasks that we do as part of our work into best practices and bad practices based on our outcome’s prediction. Best practices usually work with some sense of repeatability, and bad practices or mistakes do not work. We also see that despite our best intentions, best practices fail sometimes. We do get lucky sometimes and get a successful outcome even when we make a mistake. We often overlook or do not risk experimenting where we do not know the result. We do not learn much by continuously repeating best practices that are known to produce good outcomes. Neither do we learn much by repeating the same mistakes expecting different results.
• Fifth, we learn when a best practice leads to failure or a mistake leads to success, but these happen rarely. So, what should we celebrate? We should indeed celebrate learning as it will convert good practices into habits. Teams that are innovative and create incredible products need to learn continuously.?
• Lastly, to make retrospective outcomes more impactful & tangible.

How did I implement this practice?

As an Agile Consultant & Coach, it has been now 4+ years since I am experimenting with various Management 3.0 practices. This experimentation was carried out with one of my Scaled Agile Transformation Consulting assignment with one of the UK-based Telecommunication clients in the recent past for their two different Agile Release Trains (ART) consisting of ~180 individuals, ~19 teams in in-person and remote mode; started in Q3 2019. I was onboarded as a Program Coach and by the time I was onboarded, the client was already practicing SAFe (Scaled Agile). One Agile Release Train (ART) was up and running and wanted to launch another ART - It was a serial ART launch. Before we launch other ARTs clients wanted to mature the first ART launched (As there were significant improvement areas identified) in order to sustain practice etc. That is where I started experimenting with Management 3.0 various practices along with other practices Having said this, this article talks only about the celebration grid.

Very initial experiment – Team Level

While working with Teams (Encapsulating the above-mentioned ARTs) at times during sprint retrospectives, I witnessed participation challenges that are fairly common. In order to address that challenge and to give Agile Team a break from the ordinary “What went well?” and “What needs improvement?” etc. during retrospectives and shift their mindset from focusing on failure and success to one of learning primarily, I tried ‘Celebration Grid’ for retrospectives. As I can't be with all the teams at the same time; Scrum Masters were briefed & trained to run this practice however, I used to join teams' retrospectives whenever I could. Conveniently, there are 6 areas on the Celebration Grid, so when we ran into a participation challenge, we numbered the areas of the grid and have each person roll a die.?They are then to identify an item for the corresponding numbered area of the grid that they rolled on the die. This leads to more engagement because then conversations even start such as “oh wow, I rolled a 4 – I can’t think of one for that – I think I’ll do area 2 though”.?Please be informed that we were using physical dice for in-person events and while working remotely/and for distributed teams; I leveraged https://eslkidsgames.com/classroom-dice?which offers online/virtual dice to roll!

Scaled Experiment – Program Level

From Q4 2019 I have started leveraging this practice into the Scaled Agile ecosystem particularly in the SAFe context. A couple of months down the line (Since above mentioned the first implementation at Team Level), I scaled experimentation of celebration grid to Program-level SAFe (Scaled Agile - From a configuration standpoint, it is Large Solution SAFe) events. At the scaled level, we decided to run the celebration grids exercise on an event basis which is Program Increment (PI) Planning (Retrospective), I&A (Inspect and Adapt) workshop, and IP Iteration (Innovation and Planning). ?Below are the steps I tried exclusively for Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration for one of the ART (Agile Release Train) while working 100% remote. By the way, we maintain a distinct Kanban board for all Innovation/POC (Proof of Concept) ideas coming out.

Step 1: Firstly, I explained the six areas of the Celebration Grid and I request them to time travel and think about an example for practices they used, experiments they executed, and mistakes they made. While teams gather data, I draw a line from the top left to the bottom right on the digital whiteboard and introduce the outcome parts to the team. Later asked the team to post their findings in the corresponding area, one by one with a short explanation.

Step 2: Based on the outcome of the Celebration Grid the team pivots an idea.?Either to continue or pick a new idea/experiment they would like to execute from the Backlog for Innovation and Planning (IP) Iteration. Each experiment is written on a separate digital sticky note and simply attached to a digital board. Once the idea is there on the Kanban board teams prioritize the defined idea/experiment using dot voting and adds the most important experiments to the Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration execution Kanban board.

Step 3: In the last step, the team then selects the experiments they immediately want to execute. Normally we execute up to two experiments at once. The duration of an experiment depends on the experiment itself. After that respective timebox, the experiment is removed from the execution and another experiment may be started until all tickets (List of experiments) are moved to a done column in the Kanban board.

Next Step

Based on the outcomes observed post implementing celebrating grid at Program/Agile Release Train (ART) level, now ART Leadership wants us to take this practice to the next level which is the portfolio.?As a next step, We are exploring possible avenues to roll out in the next couple of months.?

My Experience:

• In order to stay focused on commitment, select a limited number of experiments (maybe just ‘one’) (as with any action point for improvement), and plan to “execute” the experiment in the next iteration (e.g. the next 2 weeks).
• Irrespective of the outcome, plan to discuss and assess the experiment at the next ‘retrospective’. An experiment should be evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively – specify the “evaluation metrics” beforehand.
• Focus on the learning: what did you learn? In the end, do you consider the outcome success or a failure? When not convinced, you can plan to extend the experiment. Or create a different experiment. Often, in teams, there are a lot of dynamics – different backgrounds, different opinions, no consensus – and that’s okay. The point is to agree to not agree and to plan an experiment and evaluate the outcome.
• During the initial days of experimenting with this practice, I got a question from a couple of teams members which is ‘Am I allowed to offer people some criticism?’ My answer was:?Yes, you can! Constructive criticism can be quite useful though, research has shown that negative feedback is more effective for experts than for novices. It’s ok to let novices know when they made a mistake, but their performance will increase much faster when you focus on their good behaviors.
• The celebration grid lets people come out of their comfort zone. It is important to get the discussion started. People who are engaged at the beginning will participate more during the process.
• In daily business, the Celebration Grid aided us to form an environment that allows us to experiment in changing routines. Team members are now more confident to try out new things and share them because learning comes first followed by outcomes.
• When you celebrate things, I highly recommend these suggestions - Celebrate Frequently, Celebrate Noticeably, Celebrate Remarkably, Celebrate small.
• You can even use it as a “living artifact” that remains permanently visible in the team room/MS Team channel (In my case) allowing team members to add new details to it as the situation progresses and becomes apparent to them.

My Learning as a Facilitator

• It lets the Agile Release Train find practices and experiments they already executed and performed; creates awareness that there are a lot of positive things happening worth celebrating. As time goes by, this shifts the focus away from a problem-focused view to a solution-based approach. People immediately start thinking of solutions in case problems occur or a fault was made. This in turn eliminates endless discussions about who is to blame while establishing a positive environment looking at what can be improved to avoid the same problem in the future.
• By using the Celebration Grid we can concentrate on experiments/Innovation, not on mistakes. This gives teams a different perspective of failures and respective understanding.
• The Celebration Grid helps to motivate the Agile teams to run more experiments, with the positive effect that it leads to even more celebrations, which in turn fosters the culture of learning.
• We had a thoughtful dialogue about what happened than only using the general retrospective questions.
• As a facilitator I always prompt teams to not judge or punish experiments that have failed, and always to identify learnings and improvements.
• I recommend assigning the different grids to people/groups for identifying the practices and not let them run freely. This reduces participation challenges. I would do this again.
• Give people concrete questions to help them to reflect on the things that happened.
• As a facilitator, I will think of more questions connected to actions in the daily business like “Remember when this happened…” to support the teams to reflect even better. In the next retrospective, I use our new celebration team channel to remind everybody of the good practices.
• In due course, the Agile Release Train (ART) gained experience for the importance of the Retrospective/Inspect and Adapt (I&A) Event and perceive the retrospective as a medium that delivers value through finding ways to improve as a team.
• I recommended to the team to time-box the experiments to quickly pivot an idea means If an experiment will be a success or not, to make respective decisions on investments or stop an experiment at small costs rapidly. We have to get better to identify the experiments with a good outcome, and not focus too long on those with a bad outcome. Thereby, setup a cadence-based experiment evaluation policy/event.

Conclusion:

Celebration Grid is a vehicle to transform a team’s culture to celebrate learning. I facilitate teams at this point to capture their experiment ideas and create a focus for action after the celebration grid session. I really like to end the Celebration Grid session by asking which experiments the group wants to conduct tomorrow or even right after the session. Experiments are powerful: they let you/team to try out new things and free you/team from the pressure of finding a “perfect solution”.

It’s no longer about the first-mover advantage, but about the fast-learner advantage. The Celebration Grid is a Management 3.0 practice that encourages you and your teams to run more experiments and reflect on the learnings that are derived from them.

If you want to explore/learn more about the celebration grid, you can look Management 3.0 page at?https://management30.com/practice/celebration-grids/.

So, start experimenting – now!

Please Note:

• The article is prepared & compiled basis on my personal Management 3.0 practice implementation experience/view-only; you may have your own version too.
• As project celebration grid implementation images are classified; have not been shared/published with this article.
• Images from a presentation available on?Management 3.0 website?