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Sharing and building Solution Focused practice in organisations

(although the visual pun works better in German).

At last Wednesday's Scrum Breakfast in Zürich, I presented an approach to conducting Retrospectives based on the
Solutions Focus Method (which Alistair Cockburn translated in to the
Delta Method). The idea is that a retrospective is like prospecting for
gold: Building on your strengths and looking for improvements to make
your life and work better.

Here an addition comment to this from Peter Stevens, the organiser of the Scrum Breakfasts;

Once I understood the Delta Method (which I didn't until I read Alistair's article), I had a real 'Eureka!'-Moment. The idea is simple: Don't than focus on
a) what you are doing wrong or b) the unreachable goal on the horizon.
This doesn't help. Reflect on where you have come from (things are
better now than they used to be) and what is the next step in your to
making things (even just a little bit) better?


Alistair visualized this with a picture:


I have found this approach to be enormously helpful in implementing
change processes. It gives people encouragement, helps them understand
what they have accomplished, and makes the goals ahead seem much more
achievable.


You can download my presentation here. You may need to ask for the password.

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Comment by Hans-Peter Korn on March 6, 2010 at 18:21
Hi Kati, thank you for your compliment for Mark and me to spread out SF in other fields like IT-projectmanagement (which, in its "agile" tradition, is very open for SF)!
"Mining for gold" is a wording from Norm Kerth, see http://www.swqual.com/newsletter/vol2/no6/vol2no6.html , to describe the benefit (= "golden nuggets") of retrospectives:
He suggests this questions to "mine gold":

What worked well that we don’t want to forget?

What did we learn?

What should we do differently on the next project?

What still puzzles us?

What do we need to discuss in more detail?
Comment by Katalin Hankovszky on March 6, 2010 at 17:06
Hi Hans-Peter, sounds elegant and useful. Can you help me with this: "The idea is that a retrospective is like prospecting for gold" (maybe it's about my language). What I understood, reminded me the small film from Mark I just linked to ning.
What I very much appreciate about your presentation and Marks' speech, that you are present with SF in 'other' fields, in specific organizational context.

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