Continuous Improvement - The First Symptom To Fix

Yesterday I started writing about continuous improvement , and how incredibly difficult it is to bring to life in reality. Whilst the literature on resistance to change is vast, I said we can at least look at addressing some of the more common symptoms of these issues.

So, with that in mind, let's say that the first symptom of poor continuous improvement is pretending that it is happening when it isn't.

I have a pet theory about how this manifests in team retrospectives.

Initially, teams start retrospecting with every good intention. They talk about what works, what doesn't work, and what they'd like to be different. After a few weeks, they begin to realise that nothing is actually changing at all, let alone getting better, and morale around the event starts to drop.

To bring the energy back up, a well intentioned Scrum Master starts to introduce the idea of 'retrospective games'. Retrospectives built around a theme from the world around them, to try to make the event more 'fun'. The event becomes more fun for sure, but it still continues to achieve little to no change in how teams and those around them get stuff done. Eventually management starts to notice how much time the team are spending 'playing agile games' and the whole fortnightly farce gets canned as teams get told to get back to work.

At this point, the teams blame the management for not understanding agile approaches, the management blame the Scrum Master for wasting valuable time, and the whole agile thing goes backwards in the organisation.

Another reason contributing to this phenomenon is the fact that even if teams were good at driving their own continuous improvement through team level retrospectives, many of the issues they face will, at their heart, be systemic. That is, they will be being caused by things happening in the world around them that are beyond their control.

For example, they can try to get people on their team to collaborate better, and for a while they might, but if the organisation's performance management system grades people individually against each other, and rewards them for their individual performance, then collaboration will always suffer. Only by resolving that systemic problem will the issue truly be fixed, and that systemic problem is beyond the team's ability to fix. So it never gets fixed, and the team just end up playing games in their retrospectives to take their mind off the whole depressing situation.

What we need to do then is be honest as to whether continuous improvement is actually happening.

Just because you hold retrospectives every sprint, it doesn't mean you're doing continuous improvement.

Pretending that continuous improvement is happening when it actually isn't will stall things before they even get going, and hide the very real problems that exist. Without honesty around the degree to which we're genuinely doing continuous improvement, not only can we not do it, we can never even hope to do it.

Let's assume though you fix this first symptom and admit that continuous improvement isn't happening. You're still left with the reason it isn't happening, which is quite likely to be because of systemic issues beyond the team's control, often at more senior levels of the organisation.

With this in mind, it seems simple to say that the team should try to escalate their systemic issues to a level in the organisation that can fix them, but often this runs into another issue. Senior managers who say "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions".

We'll look at that in tomorrow's article...