The Why Tree and the Low Hanging ActionsA Retro format, Designed by Franky Redant, Agile coach at Agile in the Core together with Shanda Cordingley and Dries Bellen, both Scrummasters at Eurocontrol.

Goal

This retro format helps teams to explore the root causes of a problem or issue, as a team and helps them to formulate actions to solve the root cause of causes.

The format is inspired on techniques like : the 5 why’s, silent mindmapping

1. Set the Stage

Welcome Kerth’s Prime Directive

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources

available, and the situation at hand.“ (Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review)

State the problem for example : “we consistently are unable to finish all committed stories

in our sprint” “we don’t have an integrated application so we can do our

demo properly to our customer”

10’

Have the team think of causes of the problem. Eg. Why are we not able to finish all stories we committed to?

Ask the team to write the reasons on post-its (silently) and put them on the board/wall as shown in the image. Connect the problem statement with the causes but drawing a line on the whiteboard or by adding string.

Once the first line of reasons are there, let the team (silently add more causes and let them dive into specific ones, by asking why several times. There is no need to explicitly ask 5 times why. Just let them drill down the problem. Ask regularly “why?”

Gather data Problem stateme

nt

10’

Gather data & generate insight.

Problem stateme

nt

In the second round (drilling deeper into the causes) you can let them discuss or they can continue silently. Discussing will generate insight more quickly.

Causes that are related or similar can be rearranged the board or the team can use lines to indicate the relation between causes.

When you asked them When the team sees no more causes they can discuss and try to figure out whether they have found the most important causes for the problem.

15’

Define actions

Finally let the team define actions together. Ask them as they write each action on a post-it to indicate which cause it would help to fix.

It might be useful to remind the team about the circles of influence (control – influence – out-of-control) to help them focus on action they can actually control or at least influence)

Also have them indicate who will work on which action (either simultaneously or after all action are on the board. They can add themselves on more than one task, you can limit the number if you want.

If there is more than one person on a task, they taskteam needs to indicate an owner who will report on the progress during the daily standup.

Problem stateme

nt15’

5. Close the retro

To close the retro you can use a number of formats Happiness vote? Do you feel confident we have found the root causes to

our problem? Do you feel confident the actions will solve the

problem?

What did you feel about this retro?

Or any other closing you fancy.

Good luck! And Enjoy!

10’

Setup and Material

A big whiteboard or a wall prepared with sticky

whiteboard sheets (static plastic sheets that stick to walls) or flipchart paper.

Post-its, at least 2 colors Whiteboard (erasable) markers If using flipchart paper, yarn or removable line tape to

indicate relationship between post-its

The timings indicated in the circles on the previous slides are indicative.

Some pictures(*)

(*) with permission from the Eurocontrol n-CONECT team

Agile in the Core

The team of experience Agile and Agility coaches at Agile in the Core (*) has helped to transform many teams and organisations to become agile in mind and method.

If you have a team that needs help in agile methods, mindset or tools,

If you want to transform your organisation to an agile enterprise :

Find us at http://agileinthecore.com Or contact me at mailto:franky.redant@cegeka.be

(*) Agile in the Core is a Cegeka Group brand.