Questioning the Retrospective Prime Directive

Up to this point and even in the first half of this article I continued to be skeptical of why it would make sense not to call out if an individual was not performing up to what was expected... but now I think the light bulb has gone on, I only hope I can remember this when I need to apply it.

For what it's worth, I'm personally truly believing that everyone is doing the best he can. I can understand and empathize when someone isn't truly believing it, though.

What I find dangerous is the notion I seem to read in some of the comments above, that you should *pretend* to *truly believe* that everyone did his best. To me that sounds counter to acting authentically, which I feel is very important for open honest communication.

Ilja makes an important point: authnticity is essential to personal and team development.

My experience on retrospectives has been that team members not performing well, or getting distracted will own up to it themselves, thus removing the need for anyone to believe (or pretend to believe) otherwise. That is when the process feels healthy. Rather than faking this belief thing, I feel it is better to foster a culture throughout the daily working life that allows people to fail, to be distracted, to goof off -- and to own their behavior.

The retrospective is not a time to evaluate performance, I agree, but it is also not a time to lie about reality.

I think perhaps the prime directive is an outmoded idea more suitable to teams not used to discussing things openly. I hope most Agile teams these days are beyond that.

I never understood the Prime Directive to ask us to lie about reality. I never understood it to ask us to *not* own our own behavior. And I always tried to get that across in the discussion of the PD at the start of a retrospective.

I guess I always had the Second Directive in mind, when using the Prime Directive: "We accept the responsibility to change at least one of the conditions that made our best less than we now want it to be."

I like the second directive very much (and appreciated the link to The Responsibility Razor -- good stuff).

On reflection, I don't agree with myself that the prime directive is outmoded, just the way it is applied. The ideas of belief in others, trust, and respect should be applied every day, all the time, not just at the retrospective. I like to think that is what I do, which is why (perhaps) I have never actually used the prime directive in a retrospective. The same concepts are just sort of implicit.

:)

Perhaps, depending on the climate of the room, it's sometimes necessary to allow people the option to leave if they can't buy the Prime Directive?

I have had some times when I have been very demotivated at work, and during these times I did some lousy work. But it was still the best I could do - given all the other things that were happening around me and my mental state at the time. A lousy job was the best I could do that day. I think everybody - by definition - is always doing their best.

I think the prime directive is true and you should really believe in that to perform the retrospective.




I wrote more about it in this post

franktrindade.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/dont-bla...




Cheers

I have written a blog post recently with some more context about the Prime Retrospective as originally described in Kerth's book. I found a mismatch between the original intention of the prime directive (just one tool among many others to establish safety and trust and enable learning) and it's common use by Agile teams (the only tool that brushes the problem of safety and trust aside). Also, to prime directive quoted here is different from the one originally written by Norm.

marcin.floryan.pl/blog/2012/07/whats-wrong-with...

The biggest change in a organization that I have ever observed occurred when its management decided to assume that the prime directive was true. They turned a blame culture into a trust culture almost overnight. A huge amount of bickering, friction and bad vibes just disappeared.