Designing a retrospective for effective learning by entering their (language) domain.
Preparing for a retrospective.
Project participants attend a retrospective because they want to learn from what happened during the lifetime of a project, department, company or organization. To make an emotional connection, participants must be able to relate what happens during the retrospective to problems experienced during the project or their time in the department, company or organization.
Design the retrospective process to meet the participants cultural domain as close as possible. Learn about their culture before the actual retrospective meeting so that you can use vocabulary familiar to them and understand what the purpose of the project, department or company is/was. You can walk around a day and interview some people in one-on-ones to get an impression of the type of problems that were encountered and/or you could attend one of their meetings as observer.
Related patterns:
This may require extra work from you as a facilitator, but it beats having the participants learn about retrospectives (your job) instead of what the sponsor/customer expressed they wish to learn about: the project, department, company, or (local) organization. If you feel it is too much work, consider not facilitating this retrospective and/or using ?UpwardDelegation. If you have the impression the culture is highly hierarchical, or emotionally disconnected, consider using the InvolvedParticipants pattern.
During the actual retrospective meeting participants feel more free to speak about realistic and to them relevant problems. A focus on learning in and from their own domain allows participants to experience how the retrospective lessons can help them solve existing problems. In addition, learning becomes easier for participants when they can make an emotional connection to the retrospective process.
If you overdo it you will no longer be a cucumber providing enough "foreign element" for the participants to invoke their interest and learning from, but you will be pickled to a gurken by their culture and are likely to run around in the same loops and in the same way they do. All humans do seem to run around like that to a certain extend (I certainly seem to do so regularly), but as long as the loops are different enough, we can help each other learn.
The fish is always the last one to see the water. Be the fish the participants in their domain, or you as a facilitator in yours. Fish have no use for learning how to live on land.
Jerry Weinberg [1] writes: "... Part of the answer is the human propensity for habituation: the successive reduction of response to a repetitive stimulus. Habituation allows us to cancel out the constancies in our environment, thus simplifying our lives. When something new appears in our little universe, it is most stimulating. After it remains a short time, offering neither threat nor opportunity, it becomes part of the "environment", or background. Eventually, it is cancelled out entirely. ..."
Note: Occasionally you can encounter an animal you believe not to belong in water and yet they seem to believe themselves fish of some sort. People usually have very sound reasons for believing what they believe in.
Originator: NynkeFokma ...
[1] Weinberg, Gerald. M: "Are your lights on", Dorset House Publishing 1990, ISBN: 0-932633-16-1, pp 155.