I recently attended a local meetup with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) NC  group, led by Mary Thorn and Laura Burke.  Mary and Laura facilitated an exercise developed by Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge.   It was a fantastic exercise, and something I want to use as a large-scale retrospective style facilitation technique.

We worked in table groups to identify a chronology of events that got our organization to where we are today.  Just listing a few key events or changes along your journey is adequate.  Then, we imagined our ideal future state, our heaven, and captured some elements of what that might look like above the timeline with blue stickies.  We then imaged it all going off the rails, a terrible future state for our journey, our hell. Elements for this state were captured on red stickies.

The next step was to trace backwards from each of these two future states, heaven and hell, to your timeline, to determine where the path toward each of those two states diverged from your current path.  Put another way, what should you have done to achieve your heaven, and where did you go wrong, that may lead you to hell. This allowed me to to identify some critical events in our agile journey that are worth revisiting.

Certainly there are a myriad of ways to unpack this exercise, but the future backwards timeline provided a great visual to analyze key events.  I would love to use this technique for a large group retrospective. Either a release or project event, or maybe even to look back on a whole year or milestone for an agile adoption.

Until the Next Iteration . . .

Jason