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<h2>Why don't we practice self-reflection in Agile?</h2>
<h3>Self-reflection requires maturity</h3>
<label>01 June, 2020</label>
<p>Self-reflection is my favorite part from agile. Call it a retrospective or a post-mortem; at the end of the day it is self-reflection. This is the self-correcting mechanism. You see what you have done. If it is not working, you do something else. If it perhaps the essence of agile. You can give up on everything, but if you keep practicing self-reflection and self-correction, you are doing it correctly. </p>
<p>It is also the least practiced one. If practiced, it is most likely poorly done. Self-reflection is about accepting reality. Accepting reality is hard. You need three elements for self-reflection to work: maturity to accept reality, safety to point it out, and power to improve things. </p>
<p>If these conditions don't exist, then doing a retrospective becomes an empty ritual. In the best of cases it is a waste of time. In the worst, it can become a bullying session. In both cases it becomes unpleasant, so people will try to avoid doing it. </p>
<p>Accepting reality is the biggest challenge. It takes emotional maturity for individuals and organizations, which are made from those individuals. </p>
<p>Individually we find it painful to accept reality because we are afraid that it will shatter our self image. We may not be as productive as we were. We may have forgotten a lot about working in css. We may be struggling to learn iOS development. It is common that most of us will rather deny these realities because they force us to change the our self narrative. We avoid this pain.</p>
<p>Acknowledging these short comings can help us overcome them. If we notice we are less productive, we can start looking for the cause. Maybe we are not sleeping enough. Maybe we need to get a book on css. Maybe asking the iOS developer for help can overcome the change. Yet before we can act on the deficiencies, we need to identify and acknowledge them. </p>
<p>We find a similar dynamic as a group, in our teams. Even if we have team members that can handle reality, the team as a whole may not be able to do so. This is where safety and power comes into play. Those in power must make it safe to have team members bring up reality and act on suggestions.</p>
<p>Let's say that a deadline was missed. The team knows it was missed because the schedule was overly optimistic. If members don't feel safe to point it out because they can be punished for doing so, they won't. People will become yes men out of necessity. Leadership will increasingly find themselves in a parallel reality where their beliefs are reality -- until reality reassesses itself, often in painful ways. </p>
<p>Maybe the team can be mature enough to acknowledge reality, but they lack power to make changes. If a schedule is too optimistic, you need to add more slack to it. But the team manager may not have the power to do that. Or it was identified that the team needs training in a new technology executives decided to adopt. But they won't give them the budget. </p>
<p>Retrospectives then become a ritual that teaches learned helplessness. People will become jaded. They will resent the ritual because it is meaningless.</p>
<p>In reality most of us work in places where the conditions are not ideal. What to do? As individuals we can practice self-reflection ourselves, and act within our power. If it is safe, we can model this with coworkers. This is what each of us can do to foster a culture of self-reflection and safety.</p>
<p>If you are a manager you have greater power to shape culture. There are two things that are important to create this culture. The first one is to honestly model self-reflection. The stress is on the honesty. The second one is to act on suggestions.</p>
<p>If you were responsible for the optimistic schedule, you can acknowledge that, and adjust it. Say something like, "I forgot to include slack for people getting sick" or "I didn't take into consideration the mandatory corporate retreat". Then you need to follow through fixing the schedule.</p>
<p>Let's say that in a retrospective workers say slack is too distracting, and they need 4 hours where they can turn it off so they can focus on work. The manager wants to make sure that people can still be reached within reasonable periods of time. The manager says that they can turn off slack for two hours, check messages and answer them then, and then turn it off for another two hours. The team most likely be pleased. It may not be 4 hours solid, but getting two focus segments are better than none.</p>
<p>We must keep in mind that power is often limited, so we can sometimes only do modest changes. Hopefully those changes can build up over time and we can then reap the benefits of self-reflection.</p>
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