Beware greed in retrospectives

Retrospectives are healthy. Retrospectives are vital for improving our work life. Without them, we wouldn't have a systematic way of examining what needs improving and what we might do about it.

Even so, too often I see teams becoming so excited with the 57 things they've just discovered could do with improvement that they want to try them all at once. Beware greed in retrospectives - do your best to pick just one. Search for the most valuable improvement opportunity, design some experiments for countermeasures, and focus on that one improvement. Create a measurement system such that the results can be analysed with as much clarity as possible. Let the data speak.

Only then focus on the next most pressing constraint and repeat the process of root cause analysis, countermeasure design, experimentation and adaptation. We owe it to ourselves to be very reserved with our investments - we only have a very limited capacity for improvement, we should spend it wisely, on the item that we expect will lead to the best improvement.

Hrair - how many folks should we have in our meetings?

Meetings:

• Some are the bane of our existence. Too many people involved, too easy to get distracted, not much happening overall.
• Some are delightful. Just enough people, high energy, intense conversation and collaboration, joyful enthusiasm shared.

It turns out that our brains are wired such that we can only keep a very small number of things in mind at any one time. Some argued for 7+/-2, some say even less, around three or four.

Hrair is a word found in the rabbit vocabulary of the book Watership Down. Since rabbits have an awful time with numbers, they only have actual words for numbers one, two, three, and four. Any number after that is hrair, which literally means "a thousand", but often means "a lot". The idea is that for humans, hrair might be similar, and at most stretch to 7 plus-or-minus 2.

The interesting observation is that small meetings (of no more than hrair folks) tend to be far more focused, effective and joyful. The same concept applies to Agile teams - teams of no more than hrair folks have an advantage at keeping tightly focused on a shared set of goals.

Groups of more than hrair people find it increasingly harder to keep focused on a single conversation. It becomes a progressively easier to get distracted and tempted to draw into a side-conversation with hrair folks or less.