(This one of a series of posts retelling my experience of attending QCon London 2009.)

I attended Linda Rising’s retrospectives tutorial during the morning. Linda’s gentle and caring presentation style is perfect for getting such delicate material across. If you have chance to see her then I highly recommend it. Linda had a number of key messages which I’ll attempt to summarise here:

• Companies are using smaller and smaller iterations (for example, Amazon has one day iterations)
• Companies are having smaller retrospectives too (2-3 hours)
• We should test knowledge constantly - i.e. at the end of each iteration rather than project
• Experience provides data not knowledge
• Around 3 concrete changes to make should result from each iteration (more changes tend to be less affective)
• Typically people have feelings and thoughts but no place to express them in the normal course of business
• A retrospective is a place that you can talk about things that you don’t normally get chance to talk about
• Retrospectives help create communities through ‘whole-team’ reflection
• Create safety by removing people that people prefer not to be in the meeting to encourage more open and flowing discussion
• Use a team-created timeline of the iteration as a medium for discussion
• Offer appreciations

One of the things that struck me most was this last point: offer appreciations. Linda described a scenario that goes as follows: sit around the table and allow people to offer appreciations to one or many other people. For example an appreciation might start as “I just wanted to say that I noticed that Ted worked crazily hard last week to allow this phase of the project to meet its targets…”. Now the interesting part of this scenario is that Ted is only allowed to do one of two things: sit in silence, or say “you’re welcome.” The point being that we should be more vocal about our appreciations to others and we should also accept them rather than shrug them to one side claiming “it’s nothing”, or “I was just doing my job.” Really interesting and inspiring stuff.

In the afternoon I sat and polished my presentation material and whilst I was doing it the Queen turned up! Well, not actually at the conference centre itself (although it is her namesake) but across the way to join in the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth.