feedback Archives - Page 2 of 4

How To Improve With The Start Stop Continue Retrospective

TomDesign Thinking, Discussion, Mental ModelsFebruary 19, 2021August 8, 20211 Comment

The Start Stop Continue routine has been around for decades. It is commonly used as a ‘retrospective’ activity in Agile development and Scrum meetings.

Our development toolkit is filled with templates, activities and protocols for reflection, but often the simplest tool can be the most effective.

In this post, I explore the fundamental components of the reflection, how you can use it and the benefits. I also share an extended version that gives you some new options to try in your next review session.

Before you finish make sure you grab a copy of the editable PDF resource for the Start Stop Continue extended version. You can use it in your next meeting.

Start Stop Continue

In its simplest form, the protocol explores the three actions of its namesake. When you are reviewing the development of your project or even your own teaching practice, ask these three simple questions.

What should I stop doing?
What should I keep doing?
What should I start doing?

What are the benefits?

Provides a clear and comprehensive structure for agreeing on and setting actions.
Helps teams explore different types of improvements, using three different triggers.
Makes it easier for individuals to talk about what is not working and clarify issues.
Simple and memorable enough to be conducted quickly with little preparation.
Flexible enough to be valuable for individuals or large teams.

How do I facilitate the Start Stop Continue?

The first thing to do is grab a copy of the editable PDF resource for the Start Stop Continue. All of the sample questions below are included in the download.

This retrospective model will help you and your team explore what is working, what is not effective and what might be useful to try.

To support this and make it easier for participants, use some of the example questions below:

Start

What practices do you need to START doing?
Outline some of the new ideas that you want to start?
What are the habits you want to start?

Stop

What negative practices do you need to STOP?
What are the low-impact processes which need to stop?
What do you need to stop investing in?

Continue

What established practices do you need to CONTINUE doing?
Which aspects of your work need to be maintained?
What needs continued investment to maintain the impact you want to see?

A useful hack from Sarah Beldo, Head of Content and Communications at Miro, is to switch the order a little:

I’ve found that people find it easier to think about what already exists – both the good (“continue”) and the bad (“stop”), before venturing into uncharted territory (“start”).
Sarah Beldo, 7 retrospective templates we love and use at Miro

Extend Your Reflection

Beyond the core Start Stop Continue routine, we can extend the reflection protocol in a few different directions. I think these provocations offer some much-needed nuance to the activity.

For example, the option to Pause, and not just Stop, is a useful distinction. The addition of shifting the thinking frame forward and back in time helps us to consider some important strategic modes of reflection.

I have developed the following additional provocations to complement the core trio and help you facilitate a comprehensive reflection.

Improve

What aspects of your practice can you IMPROVE?
Which parts of your project have room for growth?
What changes can you make to increase the impact?

Pause

Which elements of our work need to be PAUSED to allow resources to shift elsewhere?
Which projects would benefit from a short developmental hiatus?
Which projects are a priority and would benefit from other elements being PAUSED?

Fast Forward

Which aspects of this project would benefit from an increase in pace?
How might we increase the speed of development?
In the future what might be a block or challenge to the success of this?

Rewind

What have we learned from the story of development so far?
If we returned to the beginning of this project what would we start with?
What can we learn from how this problem was handled in the past?

Challenge

Which assumptions do we need to CHALLENGE?
What bias do you need to talk about and better understand?
What will you do to disrupt and challenge the status quo?

Download your editable PDF

If you are interested in this extended version of the model you can download an editable PDF. Just subscribe to my weekly newsletter and I will send you a copy.

Potential Uses and Applications

You have reached the end of a teaching placement, and you want to capture your reflections.
Your team is making progress with the implementation of a new programme prototype and you want to refine the approach.
You want a simple structure to use with your coach to reflect on the past few weeks.
During a weekly catchup with one of your team, you want to implement a simple structure for personal/professional mentorship.
At the beginning of the term, you want a framework for some collective reflection for your class.
You have moved into new learning spaces and need a tool to review what is working and what needs changing.

It does not matter how good the feedback is

TomFeatured, FeedbackMay 16, 2019September 7, 20223 Comments

When we are not ready to hear feedback, it does not matter how good the feedback is. This tension is a simple truth that often goes unnoticed during the process. That is why many of my tactics and strategies to improve feedback focus on how well we can receive it. It does not matter how good the feedback is.

During the process of creating something, we invest in different ways. Let’s say for this article; the creative process is a student working on writing a narrative piece that has a simple planning, drafting and editing process. But it could be anything: from a conference presentation you are making, a script you have been pitching, a product you are building or a jewellery piece you are designing.

Please extend these ideas into your context and consider how it is more important what you do with your feedback.

Once the task of crafting her story is shared, our student’s ideas will begin to bubble. For feedback to be useful, it should happen as early as possible. Depending on the learning design a student will invest in her writing in the following ways.

Factors Affecting the Response to Feedback

Cognitive effort

Is the work effortful? The challenge of planning and drafting a piece of narrative is quite broad. Our student invests cognitive energy in the problem. The levels of cognitive effort are likely to be very different for everyone. Some of us find it easy to develop slides for a presentation, whereas others have to invest more cognitive effort.

Perhaps what is more important here is the level of accumulated cognitive effort. In other words, how much thinking we have done. When feedback occurs at: “I have spent ages thinking about this.” it is received in a fundamentally different way to: “I have only just started thinking about this”.

Emotional Investment

When something is more meaningful to us, we want to commit. We cannot learn anything unless we care about it. Passionate commitment to a piece of writing is not always a part of the experience but given time; a writer will invest emotion into their work. When there is a high level of emotional investment, it is harder to hear critique.

Creativity

The ideas for the narrative piece need investment to get off the ground; creativity is the engine room. But over-investment in a poor plan is a harsh environment for feedback. There are lots of potential barriers to effectively hearing feedback here. For example, the first idea is considered the best approach or clutching too tightly to an idea even when it is a poor one.

Resources

Over time more and more resourcing is brought to a project. Tasks that have unlimited resources from the very beginning often lead to overcommitment. Should we be using every pencil in the set?

Accumulated Time

My reference here is the quantity of time that our student spends on her work. This amount accumulates as the work progresses and as the project continues. We are often far less inclined to action feedback when we have committed hours and hours to a version.

Here is another set of ideas that change throughout a creative task such as writing.

Fidelity

Although messy in reality, the path of a creative task is towards higher and higher fidelity. Let’s define fidelity as to how close the outcome is to the original concept. As time and effort accumulate, we would like to think that we are approaching a higher fidelity. At which point do we stop hearing feedback?

Opportunities to fail

Stakes get higher as opportunities to fail reduce. This is closely related to the amount of time that has passed and how long a student has been working on a piece of writing. Commitment to a “final” product or draft is crossed, and any significant changes or large scale feedback is difficult to action.

It is worth noting here that this could be a perception and have no grounding in reality. A student may incorrectly perceive they cannot start again or change their work at a late stage. It might not be ideal, but it may only be a perceived constraint. The second order effect is the stakes get higher.

Opportunities for formative evaluation

As stakes get higher, opportunities to fail reduce (perceived at least) and opportunities of formative assessment reduce. The word “formative” has a time stamp on it. Developmental evaluation should be happening as the writing begins to grow. Think of a more frequent reference to our “formative years’: that time in our life when we were learning life lessons.

The ebb and flow between divergent and convergent thinking

Convergent and Divergent Mindsets

At the very centre of this is the disposition of the feedback receiver. Typically the mindset is somewhere on the Convergent – Divergent scale. As we decide on ideas and as our commitment or effort increase so our disposition shifts to Convergence. We rally around a core idea and push on. Our thinking becomes narrow as opposed to the expansive open thinking we should have done to get started.

Remember, this is a critical shift and one that allows us to execute creative work and not just deliver a hot mess of ideas. When it comes to the conditions for effectively receiving feedback, we might assume we need to be in a divergent state. But that is not always the case – the feedback needs to match the disposition state.

If I am refining a single idea and the intricate detail within it, I do not need other more significant ideas that might replace it. We have to be aware of the mindset of the receiver of feedback and carefully adapt what is shared.

The exception to this is always having an open disposition to feedback regardless of when it occurs. In my experience, what is coupled with this is a well-established feedback filter. After all, just because it is shared and we have received it, does not mean we need to do anything with it. We can still be open to late feedback when we are narrowly executing an idea.

Late and Early stage feedback

Let’s map these variables and how their levels of investment increase or reduce over the course of a project.

Variables affecting early and late stage feedback — Variables Affecting Early and Late Stage Feedback

Formative evaluation needs to happen early on in a project arc. This allows the receiver of feedback to be most ready to hear it. Our student’s mindset is more open or divergent, and they are more likely to action new ideas.

Late stage feedback can still be invaluable, but we have to raise a red flag and be aware that receiving the feedback may be more challenging, requiring a much higher level of skill.

Practical Strategies

Here are five strategies that emphasise early feedback and ways to mitigate some of the challenges we have explored in this article.

Design the feedback process – take your time to consider the frequency and type of feedback that is going to be shared. Intentionally design feedback opportunities.

Design “low investment” creative tasks – increase the constraint on creative tasks at the beginning. Work on whiteboards or post-it notes rather than impressive graphic organiser, work with thick marker pens rather than every pencil in the set. Develop ideas on the back of a napkin, literally and metaphorically.

Create opportunities for early feedback – a tonic to many of these challenges is to design as many options for initial input as possible. Early in the process, we are more likely to have an open mind to critique.

Explore a range of ideas – work to develop a wide range of designs. We tend to have a bias towards our first idea. With little constraint, we might overcommit. Practice the thoughtful exploration of various concepts. Crazy 8s is always a good starting point.

Match the feedback type to the point in the process – a critical insight I want you to take away is that feedback is received in very different ways. Attempt to match the feedback to the person receiving it and their journey. (Learn more about this in my article about 30% and 90% feedback.)

Despite the best intentions of the feedback provider, their high skill levels and even high quality – unless the receiver is ready to receive, it does not matter. Mitigate this by using some of these practical strategies and considering how we might increase the capacity, readiness and disposition of receiving feedback.

Photo by Efren Barahona

Prototyping – the quickest way to learn how bad your ideas really are!

TomDesign Thinking, FeedbackMarch 9, 2018March 9, 20182 Comments

Prototyping is all about the process of generating multiple versions of a solution so you can continually improve it.

Prototyping is one of the later stages of the design process and is normally folowed by a period of testing. You can make a prototype without testing it. This stage normally follows on from a time when you and your team have generated and filtered a range of ideas.

It would also be true to say that the sooner you are prototyping and testing the better as this often instigates new thinking quite quickly.

A different way of thinking about this stage is that prototyping is to engineer as many opportunities for feedback as you can. Feedback is the main reason anyone creates rough versions of anything. Rough and ready versions give us the chance to test and think about what works and what doesn’t. And to truly understand how bad our ideas are.

You have to remember that the only thing that is worse than a bad idea is one that has been isolated from feedback for too long.

Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them to grow and get stronger, starved of it and your ideas will get weaker.

When you create a rough prototype, first draft or early sketch you are using iteration to develop your creative ideas.

Often the first prototype you can create is the moment you describe your idea to someone else.

What if we…
Imagine that you…

Your FVP (first verbal prototype) is the kick to then begin representing your idea in a more tangible way.

I developed this little decision tree to help you and your students think through some ideas for prototyping.

A Visual Prototype will be one that focuses on the look (and feel) of the product, but it will not function. You will likely focus on:

Sketches and illustrations
Storyboarding a short video
Digital / paper wireframes
Creating the packaging for your product
Making an advert for your service
Photo sequence for a new service
On-the-shelf mockup (placing your new packaging alongside competitors in a real store)

A Functional Prototype will be one that focuses on showing how something will work, even in a rudimentary way. The visual quality will be ignored.

3D printing
Paper prototype and mockup
App mockup
PPT or Google Slides for a website mockup
Bodystorming a service (using roleplay to act it out)
Cardboard life scale mockup

You might also explore the following reflection promtpts to help you make the most of the prototyping process.

Which type of prototype is most feasible / useful in the time you have?
Why is your choice appropriate for the solution you are exploring?
What resources and support will you need to build your prototype?
Who are you testing your prototype on?
What specific aspects of your idea do you want feedback on?
How will you record feedback and ideas?

–

I discovered the little app POP by Marvel which is a fantastic way to quickly prototype ideas for apps. I drew around my phone and then did some sketches. Took some photos and added some links and hotspots and then you have a little functioning app.

Sketches

Hotspots

App screens

Took me 5 minutes (including downloading the app) a great example of a functioning prototype. I need to work on the visuals!

If you enjoyed this post you should check out my article on the Prototyping Disposition and Learning in Perpetual Beta.

How to create the ideal conditions for dialogue, creativity and feedback

Tom28 Days of Writing, Creativity, Dialogue, FeedbackFebruary 11, 2018August 30, 20201 Comment

I thought I would share in a little more detail about some of the different things we can do to positively impact on these topics.

Creativity Can Be Blocked

One of the most interesting areas to read about is the disposition it takes to be able to be creative.

In this context, I refer to creativity as the generation of novel ideas that add value. Much of the time we face a range of blocks that get in the way of this endeavour.

These can often be our own approach and self-censoring, even self-sabotaging. Or the environment around us sometimes has a negative impact through exuberant judgement or too much pace.

During the session, we will have a look at the different types of blocks and explore the ideal conditions for ideas to thrive.

Speak up!

Dialogue is no different and it can be a delicate experience, swayed and influenced by dominant voices or even culled by assumptions and an underlying threat.

Of course, we can control much of these issues through deliberate protocols and practices. Long term it is about establishing a core set of habits that work for you.

Dialogue is different to a discussion, the former being much more akin to building and developing ideas together in a highly supportive environment. Certain conditions will encourage this and some will detract from it.

Feedback, up, down, forward

Getting feedback right has been a focus for thousands of teachers the world over for many years now. And yet we still seem to spend too much time exploring how to give feedback.

Ultimately we might all be expert feedback givers, but unless the recipient is an expert receiver of feedback, and it is done in a supportive and encouraging space – little may change.

In the workshop, we will explore practical tools and activities for providing and receiving feedback effectively.

We will pay close attention to how we might design the ideal conditions for feedback conversations to take place and what we might do to ensure it is heard and acted upon in the most positive way.

–

Imagine each of these – Creativity, Dialogue and Feedback as three little seedlings, each ready to burst forth – we just need to carefully surround them with the ideal conditions to thrive and grow.

~~Join me on the 13th April in Melbourne for my keynote and workshop at TeachTechPlay.~~

#28daysofwriting

Photo by Neslihan Gunaydin on Unsplash

Tear Off Your Label

TomDialogueFebruary 6, 2018February 6, 2018Leave a Comment

When we pay attention to setting clear expectations and creating the optimum conditions for dialogue, our meetings and sessions with our colleagues will be much improved.

This effort to establish a safe environment for talk – before the talking – is one of my core activities when working with a team.

It holds for me that this effort will have a significant impact on the quality of the experience. It is one of my 20% activities that has 80% of the impact – Pareto Principle in action.

Anthony Bourke, a former fighter pilot, refers to a version of this during flight debriefs. In his article he explains how members of a squadron remove their symbols of hierarchy to signal an open space for feedback.

However you structure it, the debrief must be a safe place where all team members — regardless of rank or seniority — are free to share their open and honest observations on how they and their teammates performed during the mission.

In the military, we create that safe space by stripping off our nametags and rank insignia at the beginning of the debrief (they attach to our flight suits with Velcro). With the nametags off, we create a learning environment where the sole purpose is to improve performance both as individuals and as a team.

All the practice has been hard to verify, it got me thinking about how powerful that would be for members of the military.

The very symbol we covert is removed and any hierarchy is set aside for open dialogue and critique.

I wonder how we might create strong gestures and symbols of equality in meetings and development sessions?

I am sure you have been in meetings when a more senior member of the team arrives part way through and the whole dynamic changes and we all become a little more closed.

Equally I have been fortunate enough to work with leadership teams who have explciitly developed habits that allow open dialogue, however tough those interactions may be.

Perhaps it is just continued intentional practice from all of those involved to lift up every voice in the room – but especially for those who hold a “rank” to reinforce the open protocol.

What do you think?