3. You’ve never had the chance to vote on theme music at retrospective

When someone asks a question and silence follows, I’m often the guy that ends that silence with some oddball remark. In past Sprint Retrospectives when the question was asked, “What should we start doing?”, I would either respond with “Disco breaks” or “Theme music”. When people saw the Scrum Master write down my ridiculous suggestion, it signaled a green light of psychological safety. Others soon spoke up with valid suggestions. (And if they didn’t say anything, we’d have been doing disco breaks. Disco! Disco! Oooh! Ooooh!)

My very last Sprint retrospective on one project, I finally got enough votes for “Theme Music”. So I Googled “Star Wars Powerpoint animation”, downloaded the sample, plugged in an mp3 and changed the scrolling text to relate to the sprint and bingo!

Not the actual slide deck I used. I found some Star Wars fonts from cool-fonts.

In Charles Duhigg’s new book, “Smarter, Faster, Better”, he chronicles the habits that accompany highly effective teams. Psychological safety is one of them.

Duhigg shares how Google discovered this with their own people by measuring the norms adopted by successful groups. It was a surprise to those doing the analysis, who at first thought it had everything to do with the manager.

Some of these norms involved making sure everyone on the team had a turn to speak. Making sure workers weren’t afraid to report failures. Making sure workers weren’t afraid to try new things. Their manager would have their back when accidents happened.

Duhigg shared a story from the early days of Saturday Night Live, where one writer wrote a hilarious sketch that would never see the light of day because of network censorship. Even though everyone knew the sketch would be cut, Lorne Michaels had the script read at every table read for the next two days. Can you imagine the impact that had on the writer’s motivation and the teams’s faith in brave innovation?

This reason of psychological safety is why you should ask these questions in Sprint Retrospective this way.

What should we stop doing?

What should we start doing?

What should we continue doing?

instead of

What did we do good?

How did we screw up?

What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?

The former questions imply action. The latter questions imply favoritism, blame and Animaniacs.

I would also recommend setting a theme for all your avatar pictures in JIRA. We once chose, “non-speaking roles from the original Star Wars trilogy”. Or you could name your Sprints after (insert pop culture reference here).

Again, “Smarter, Better, Faster” is an awesome book. This is the link.