Try Process Changes For 2 Weeks Before Judging Them - Mike Cohn Email...

As a kid, I enjoyed visiting my grandparents. My dad’s parents were an eight-hour car trip away but we’d make the trek a few times a year.

On many of those trips, my grandmother would host extended family dinners, usually with quite a crowd in attendance.

She served a great many dishes for those dinners, including some things from “the old country.” And some of those dishes looked quite unappealing to my young palate.

But Grandma insisted we children try everything. As a matter of fact, she insisted we try two bites of everything. If we didn’t like it, we didn’t need to eat more. But we always had to eat two bites. Grandma’s theory was that things often taste much better on the second bite.

I’ve found that Grandma’s logic applies equally well to changes teams make as a result of their retrospectives. I encourage teams to try new things for two sprints before deciding whether the change is good and worth continuing or not.

Suppose, for example, a team decides to switch from two- to one-week sprints. That will undoubtedly feel a little strange at first. I tell that team not to discuss how the change went in the first retrospective following the change.

I want them to save that discussion for after the second sprint. At that point they’ll have a much better feel for whether the change was good. They’ll be able to assess the effects of the change rather than just the discomfort of making a change.

When I was young, I did as my grandmother required: I sampled each strange, new dish twice. Not surprisingly, my opinion never changed between bites. If I didn’t like the taste of the first bite, it never got better with the second bite. I was a kid, after all.

But I have seen agile teams embrace after a second sprint the changes they might have rejected after a first sprint. That willingness to really try new things is critical for teams to succeed with agile,

Mike