Dignan: Retrospectives fail when insights are treated as to-dos rather than agreements
Aaron Dignan · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · Feb 7, 2023 · at 1:08:32
Aaron Dignan, founder of The Ready, discusses why teams struggle to follow through on lessons learned in retrospectives.
0:00 / 0:42exact quote · 42.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“What do you do with the insights? And that's where most teams really fall down. So they have good inputs, they have good sorting, they have good conversations, and they really come up with some cool ideas. Like we need to change the way we do this process. We need to Change the way we pair program. We need to think about this customer issue that we didn't think about this time. And then it kind of goes to die. Like it kind of just, it goes on the cutting room floor because we don't have a way of operationalizing that stuff. And that's where it can be really, really cool to have a culture of agreements already in place is that you know what to do with it. You're like, oh, this feels like an agreement that we need to make, or this feels like we need to change an agreement we already have. And so it moves into the governance space instead of the like to-do list space.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Aaron Dignan
Dignan: Command-and-control management no longer applies to the most interesting work
“Most of those contexts are well figured out and are not the center of the universe anymore. That's not where most of the interesting work is happening.”
Dignan: Leaders falsely assume the only alternative to chaos is bureaucracy
“Essentially, we lose our way because we believe in a false choice. So most people believe that the pattern of organizational evolution is from chaos to bureaucracy.”
Dignan: Corporations squash startup innovation by imposing their operating systems
“And then to finish the doom loop that we're talking about, you bring in those acquired companies with all that creativity and judgment, and you squash it by conforming them to your operating system. And then you start over. And that's essentially how the econo…”
Dignan: Government lacks feedback loops because failure does not risk defunding
“The difference, though, is that there are very few feedback loops for the government. So one of the early kind of theories that I pull from a lot of sociocracy and the guy that kind of created the modern version of it talked about feedback constantly as like t…”
Dignan: Organizations do not have values, only operating beliefs
“Because it's the reality is that human beings have values and can hold values, but organizations don't really, they have ways of operating and beliefs about how the world and reality works.”
Dignan: Leadership requires trading short-term performance for capability growth
“And now the idea is I want you to ensure continually growing capability, which is a totally different animal. And so continuing growing capability means I need a system that is learning all the time while it's executing. And that means I'm going to have to mak…”