A community retrospective with the Accountability Process

Photo by Ben Duchac on Unsplash

Facilitating a retrospective is considered a key step in improving a team. What about within a community?

I had the opportunity to run into this problem a short time ago when I was asked to lead one for the Scrum Masters community of Soat. Indeed, do we consider a community as a team or a sum of individuals? How to allow everyone to express themselves while maintaining a benevolent framework when a vague framework and a diversity of expectations generate tensions?

Allowing everyone to step back and take responsibility for the current situation seemed important to me. And if at the same time they could learn something new, why deny it? So I decided to build a sequence in several parts including one using the Accountability process of Christopher Avery (which I will detail in more detail in a future article).

Here is a return. Happy reading ! 😉

Retrospective structure

It has been some time now that communities of practice have been established within companies.

And it's been maybe as long as I hear the same problems:

• lack of member involvement,
• a handful of motivated people who end up getting discouraged,
• an organization that is not always structured,
• an intention of self-organization which rarely bears fruit without the impetus of the creators of the community.

This community was no exception and it was further to a request from one of its members that I agreed to host this retrospective for them.

My intentions were twofold:

• Animate the retrospective and allow members to come out with improvement actions
• Make these budding Scrum Masters grow by providing them with food for thought and learning: after all, that's what they're here for!

I therefore offered them a specific retrospective structure, with the wish to convey the following message:

You are the actors of this community, take your responsibilities.

The sequence was therefore as follows:

1. Make visible the expectations and the current state of satisfaction of the members
2. Create a strategic look at the changes to be made
3. Discovery of the Responsibility Process
4. Help take action

1. Make expectations and the state of satisfaction visible

A big fan of simplicity, I simply asked everyone to write on a post-it:

• What he (or she) came to seek within this community
• A score from 0 to 10 corresponding to their current satisfaction with this objective

Note: I find the combination of words and numbers together particularly interesting. This was the origin of my article on a variant of ROTI.

We see here a certain disparity in the results, which seems rather normal to me in reality: it is easy to be biased in our perception when the frame is blurred!

However, the fact of materializing it is at least intended to make these disparities visible for future exchanges.

2. Create a strategic look

From the previous results, I invited everyone to reflect (in silence) on the elements that could have prevented their score from reaching the perfect 10.

To structure their reflection, I suggested that they use the following model (the source of which I have not yet precisely found):

I then asked them the following question:

What area would be the main lever for improvement for you?

The result was the following:

The results reveal that the perceived problems and therefore the main levers for improvement are at the level of the people and the structure: at the interactions and therefore at the framework! 😉

3. Discovery of the Responsibility Process

In this part, I first described the model of the Accountability process of Christopher Avery.

In short, this model describes the mental process through which we go in order to manage all the situations of our daily life. We stay longer or shorter in these different states but progress sequentially to the mental state of Responsibility : where we can use our capacities and our power to create, choose and achieve.

When everything is going well, we are naturally in this state but it isIt's when things aren't going in the direction we want that we switch to the mental states below the line:

• Charge : Blame others for mistakes made
• Justification : Using excuses for things that are what they are.
• Shame : Self-blame (often feeling guilty).
• Obligation : Do what you have to rather than what you want.
• Leak : Self-blame (often feeling guilty).
• Denial : Ignoring the existence of something

Note: I will describe in a future article in more detail what offers Christopher Avery in its quest for more "Freedom, Power and Choice" (“Freedom, Power and Choice”).

4. Help take action

I then invite all members of the community to reflect on the mental state they were in when they thought about their rating and the main area of improvement, then to come and stick it on the Poster that I had drawn during my presentation.

The result is interesting:

• the majority are in Charge
• some in Shame and in Obligation

So I tell them that in all the mental states that are below the line, unfortunately, the problem is not solved.

So I invite everyone to take a few minutes and reflect on the following:

What is the action that I am ready to implement, for the group, in a mental state of Responsibility ?

The exercise is not easy for everyone and it is normal: there is sometimes an injunction to find an action in the retrospectives but we are not always asked what we really want to do to contribute to the group. Some are quick, others less so, others even decide not to issue an action but knowingly.

Conclusion

This retrospective structure was particularly interesting for me to test!

Not only does it make it possible to share an extremely powerful model, but it also induces a different introspective impact. Indeed, people do not express things openly but this guides their response during the different phases. One of the great interests is not to drown in complaints and explanations but rather that everyone asks themselves the question of what he or she can do to truly improve his situation as well as that of the group.

However, I think that the Responsibility Process should be used sparingly: it is a tool for raising awareness and helping with personal development, which means that it can be quite confrontational for some people. However, used wisely, it can very accurately target unconstructive behaviors and compassionately help people unlock their potential.

Finally, it was a way for me to show that it is the intention that drives the format and not the other way around! Indeed, I hear far too many Scrum Masters looking for “retrospective formats” to make events less monotonous, but what is the real impact on the group?

Hoping that this article has been able to open up some perspectives for you, do not hesitate to give me feedback if you try it in your teams! 😉