This is another one of the “Invert, always invert” type of questions that provides an almost immediate insight.
I keep being continually surprised by the many beautiful applications of this simple principle:
“Invert, always invert” — Carl Jacobi
A “retro-spective” means looking back on something. (from Wikipedia) From retrospect + -ive. From Latin retrōspectus, perfect passive participle of retrōspiciō (“I look back at”).
Intuitively, we are doing a retrospective on something when that something is over. However, as most of us already know the intent of the activity is to educate us and improve us – for what comes next. So the mechanics of a retrospective involve looking backwards, but the intent is forward looking.
This intent is impossible to fulfill within the context of what has just finished or is about to finish – in that context the retrospective becomes an administrative exercise in process improvement. But if we instead retrospect as the first step of our new endeavor the intent to improve is very much still possible to fulfill – the retrospective becomes a thoughtfully selected action with an expectation of impact.
For example in Scrum, where we have sprints, if sprint 12 is just finishing and we do a retrospective on that sprint as part of sprint 12, we are not able to leverage the intent of the situation, since we don’t yet have a hold of sprint 13. But if we instead decide to do the retrospective as the first thing within sprint 13, we can then easier fulfill the intent of that retro, since we are now in the more appropriate context.
Maybe it’s only semantics, but maybe not. The concept of context is critical in many scenarios around building software.
Anyone (or at least any scrum master 😅) can run an experiment by placing the Sprint Retrospective meeting at the beginning of a sprint instead of having it at the end. If you run this experiment too please share results.
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This article demonstrates inversion well:
