Silence Does Not Equal Failure

I have a confession: there are some types of people I have trouble understanding. Those people are called introverts.

See, I’m an extrovert by nature. I get energy from talking to my colleagues. At work, I like to keep my camera on in meetings, like to organize parties, and to be as social as I can. I’m one of those annoying people who actually likes small talk. If you work with me, you will always know how I feel about things.

So you can imagine my confusion when I started working with a team I’ll call my quiet team. That team displayed behaviors I saw as negatives. For instance, only the same few people spoke in up in Retrospectives and Backlog Refinement sessions, and the collective silence worried me. Was my team having problems?

I began to worry that the team didn’t care about their work or each other, weren’t passionate about their tasks, or –even worse—that there were problems below the surface eating away at the project like a cancer. Finally, in desperation to uncover the truth and become a better servant leader for my team, I tried a different technique. That technique changed my attitude and helped me understand my bias better.

Uncovering the truth

My “lightbulb above my head” moment came in an Agile Community of Practice meeting. I brought up a concern that my team was quiet and wondered if their introversion was a sign of dysfunction. One of my colleagues suggested quietness wasn’t necessarily a problem. Perhaps, she said, the team just had a culture of being quiet and that things were going better than I thought.

With encouragement from her, I looked into Silent Retrospective techniques. I was intrigued by a few, but for this exercise I landed on the idea of running an anonymous survey to gauge my team’s attitudes. My company had a subscription to SurveyMonkey, but you can easily create a similar survey using other tools, including Microsoft Forms.

What is a survey retrospective?

I decided to keep the survey simple. I created a five-question survey, looking to get a baseline for further discussion. The questions were simple and intuitive, but I walked the team through them at the beginning of our meeting. I then asked everyone to spend no more than 5 minutes answering the anonymous survey. Anonymity is required to ensure psychological safety but everyone was required to complete the survey.

The questions I used were:

• Rate the current Sprint from 1-5, with 5 being the best
• Using just a few words, why did you rate it that way?
• Rate the project so far from 1-5, with 5 being the best
• Using just a few words, why did you rate it that way?
• Who deserves Kudos for their work last Sprint?

The only optional question is around Kudos. All other responses were required. I didn’t set any boundaries around ratings. One person’s 5-point Sprint might be another person’s 3 point Sprint, and that’s fine because we respect each individual’s perspective.

I then grabbed the average score for questions 1 and 3 and presented the results to the team.

Kudos is the topic for a previous article, so read that if you’d like to understand more about that topic.

The truth will set you free

As it turns out, I was completely wrong in my perception. The survey Retrospective revealed my team was much happier than they seemed. The team rated their previous Sprint with an average of 3.75, and they rated the project even higher, at 4.2. Words like “learning”, “collaboration” and “trust” were used in questions 2 and 4. The results made it clear the team was doing the important things correctly. They trusted each other, were spontaneously organizing, and were focusing on continuous learning.

I’ve never been happier to be wrong! The survey revealed that my biases towards communication simply were different from my team’s collective biases. My team wasn’t dysfunctional. They were highly functional.

We started doing this type of retrospective roughly once per quarter. The team loved this technique because it respected their communications patterns. And I loved the technique because it made me realize I was wrong. That gift of knowledge is always a joy to accept.

To sum up, here are a few benefits I’ve found from this type of Retro:

• The team shares objective, crowd sourced ratings
• It’s easy to compare scores from survey to survey thereby getting a “happiness index”
• Even quiet team members have a safe space to provide feedback
• The team clearly understands how everyone is feeling, not just how one or two talkative people are feeling.

Have you tried a similar idea? How did it succeed or fail for you? Please leave your comments below.