Great Scott! Be kind to yourself in retrospectives

Imagine you want to go back in time to the start of an event (in a Delorean perhaps?) and tell yourself to do something differently. Do you think it would effect the ultimate outcome? If so, would other things perhaps have suffered as a result?

As members of Scrum development teams, we routinely hold a 'Retrospective' with the aim of reviewing what we spent the last 2 weeks doing and use that information to do things better going forward. Many teams also hold a project retrospective, which might look at many months of work.

These are super useful sessions, as it gives us the opportunity to think about what we did, the things we could have done differently and also the amazing things we achieved (try to focus on that, it's really forgotten most of the time). Despite that, sometimes these sessions can turn negative and often we hear "We should have done [thing] instead!" or "Why did we spent so much time on [thing]!?!". The team focusses on what wasn't great and always appear to believe that if they had done something different, the end result would have been so much better.

In some cases this is true, making different decisions WOULD indeed have had a more favourable outcome. However, it's important to remember that a retrospective is not just an opportunity to 'tell yourself off'. The decisions you made at the time were very probably made with the 'truth' that you were aware of at the time... and there were a million decisions (approximately) that you made between then and now. All of those decisions skewed the timeline in different ways and helped you travel forwards through time (stick with me) to the present day. So think about what you did and why you did it.. and learn from it. Understand the 'why' of those decisions and consider what you might do differently. But also be kind to yourself and remember that you didn't know exactly what the future looked like. Now make like a tree and get out of here!