Journey to Liberating Structures (III): TRIZ

Preface

Yet one thing that I have learned over time is that when you make a mistake- recognize it, admit to it and figure out why the mistake was made. Then do everything in your power to avoid making the same mistake again.- Dr. Marshall Hennington

Before learning from mistakes, we need to identify and admit them. In some cases, even with our best intention, we do things that benefit neither us, nor the team, nor the product. Is all that we do truly lead to a grand success?

Creative Destruction- TRIZ

TRIZ LS allows us to invert our way of thinking, be a little crazy and explore a different question: "how to ruin our work?". It gives room to reveal the hidden bad habits and come up with actions to stop them.

Step 1: What is the Worst Outcome?

When executing TRIZ, it's important to start with figuring out the worst possible outcome(s). Don't just assume what You think is the worst- let the team come up with their own version of it. Give no more than 10 minutes to write things down and pick a few points that resonate with everyone the most.

Step 2: What Should We Stop to Reach The Worst Outcome?

TRIZ does not imply that you should imagine starting insane activities which could jeopardize your work (though you could, just don't focus on it). We try way too many things already and trying even more (crazy) things are unlikely to be beneficial. Try to think about what You (as a team or an individual) should stop doing instead. Give 15 minutes for that.

Step 3: Are There Any Activities Resembling the Ones from Step 2?

Could it be that some patterns that we have developed are anti-patterns? Identify the actions from step 2 that have similarities with the practices the team does. "How to be successful?" and "how not to fail?", though they refer to the same thing, the two points of view of the same lead on to very different discussions. Spend 15 minutes identifying your work anti-patterns.

Step 4: Actions to Stop Step 3 Activities

Lastly, come back to why we are here- we want to be more efficient as a team. Nobody wants to fail and thus the anti-patterns identified in step 3 should be stopped. Spend the remaining 20 minutes coming up with ways to stop the inefficiencies.

Did It Work Out For Me?

TRIZ is a great way to shake a retrospective. Last week, we have applied it in ours (using Miro tool) and the outcome looked like this (the image quality is low on purpose):

The key anti-patterns and actions found which resonated with me the most were:

• Meetings tend to be derailed by a technical discussion that is relevant only to a few. This causes the less related people to be cut from any involvement and makes it hard to come back on track. Why do we allow this to happen? It's convenient to talk about problems when everyone is there (to listen?), but there is a time and place for different problems to be escalated. What's worse, we assume that it is rude to interrupt and we should allow others to speak (off-topic). I am not suggesting interrupting others is always okay nor that we should not listen, but we should all be on the same page on what different meetings should be for (thematically) and how to control off-topic discussions. We should not assume! In order to be on the same page, we have decided to form meeting conventions.
• It feels that learning (we have learning challenges) is not efficient. Since the team I am referring to is interns, more than delivering, we want people to grow and make use of their full potential. We could not figure out what could be done now and thus we added an action to investigate what could be done about it further.
• Placeholder user stories (due to lack of time). Placeholder stories resulted in two bad consequences: the descriptions and acceptance criteria added later was not very clear. On top of that, we would review the stories in chat. Why is reviewing them in chat a bad thing? Well, because usually only 1 person would do it and that is completely not Agile- the whole team should be involved in understanding the work that needs to be done. And that includes creating stores AND refining them.

Closing Thoughts

Imagine if we hadn't done this meeting and changed the point of view? Could we have spotted the anti-patterns? Maybe. However, we probably would not have realized any of it until it hurt us directly. Finding anti-patterns is hard because the whole reason we develop them is due to things being easier/faster that way (for the time). I can say with certainty, that shaking things up with TRIZ occasionally is worth it because from a different perspective we see things differently and that is very important if we don't want to tunnel vision ourselves thinking about just an immediate success. Spend time understanding the worst, learn from it and make sure it doesn't happen.

Next Week

Next week we will try to use a non-verbal form and learn from the team experience using Draw Together LS.