Continuous Improvement is a pompous phrase for many. It is undoubtedly a precious trophy to claim and can mean many things.

Though the most insightful is that Continuous Improvement is a behavior. Something that we can learn, adopt into our ways of working, and even get better into it. At the same time, sprint retrospectives are an excellent chance of improvement in a team.

But how do all the pieces connect?

Improve the way we improve

Improvement is like a muscle. Muscles need to exercise. But in the business world, what are the things we exercise? We exercise our mindset, resourcefulness, and culture towards progress and knowledge.

Why?

Being a skeptic myself can not help by wondering, but why? 

At the bottom line, why bother applying practices that promise the fruits of improvement?

To answer this, I could throw all sorts of experiments, researches, graphs, statistics, and other proofs in this post. 

However, I am arguing we are going to use something straightforward, not academic, though equally powerful—your experience.

What is continuous improvement?

Can you think of a soccer team (or basketball, or baseball or any sport you prefer) working out occasionally? Even if the team consists of the best talent, to be in high performance, they still need to practice diligently.

There is a certain plateau any team will reach despite talent, if not practicing. This plateau can be relevantly low for groups not having improvement as part of their process.

Let me bring an example.

For those unfamiliar with Rugby, including myself, there is a notorious rugby team, the All Blacks. One of their finest, Sean Fitzpatrick, once said, "Success is modest improvement, consistently done."

Success is modest improvement, consistently done. - Sean Fitzpatrick

Continuous improvement is a way for teams or organizations to improve processes and practices. Sounds familiar?

Continuous Improvement is the training of the team! Business people should practice too and reflect!

Retrospectives as a tool for Continuous Improvement

In the business world, we have Kaizen, Lean, Kanban, Six Sigma methodologies, where improvement of processes is critical. In Agile, we have the sprint retrospectives, as part of the delivery lifecycle to do just that, let the team work out and improve their skill set, processes, and ways of working.

Getting back to Fitzpatrick's words, "Modest" and "Consistently" ring bells. And on second thought, they seem to have been through lots of retrospectives!

Continuous Improvement takes time.

"Continuous Improvement takes time. We can’t afford it, we need to go fast."

This is something I hear more often than I like to admit. 

Now, please repeat this phrase slowly. Does this sound even more contradictory than before?

For Whom is it?

Now that we got the term and why out of the picture let's focus on the Whom. To whom this Continuous Improvement actually refers to?

...I see you there in the back with a small smirk in the face.

For Leadership

You need to start from the leadership. A small improvement originating from the leadership is potentially more impactful to the rest of the organization. 

Yes, C-level teams do have retrospectives, or at least they should!

For everyone

Then we need to approach the Continuous Improvement mindset holistically. 

Reach out for improvements that affect the whole organization and avoid local optimizations. 

An excellent practice towards this approach is the cross-department retrospectives, with representatives from different teams or departments, providing a different point of view on lingering organization bottlenecks and dependencies.

For Teams

At the center of the Continuous Improvement mindset is as you expect, the team. 

Of course, it does, because the team is more closely to the problem and thus more closely to the solution. Also, the team has more context about a situation, has the experience and the know-how.

But we do not stop there. 

For you

We should not exclude the individual from the benefits of Continuous Improvement. 

Let’s take a moment, and self reflect on the impact our behavior and actions might have on others. 

As Agile Coaches, this is something we care about, increasing the level of awareness at an individual level, and we do that with coaching, mentoring, and feedback.

Benefits of continuous improvement

The benefits of continuous improvement are apparent; as with the sports teams, it lets you evolve your "game." 

For better or worse, technology does not wait for us to evolve, and the risk of staying behind is evident.

Most of us can not afford such a development. So the most reliable way to move forward and be at the top of our game is to inspect & adapt, little by little, at the end of every iteration. Otherwise, probably we will be history!

In case you still have second thoughts, go through the following list of benefits.

• Boosts the team's morale

• Acts as a tension reliever

• A moment for team bonding and peer pressure

• Get data about how the system works right from the source

• Sharing of information

• Transparency in action

• Empower team members

• Ownership follows empowerment

• Focus on action items

• Promotes small improvements rather than radical redirection

• Limits risks

How should you improve the Agile process with continuous improvements?

In Agile, Inspect & Adapt is part of our DNA. Agile Frameworks and the rest of the practices and techniques we use could not be left out of Continuous Improvement. 

Among the things we try to go over during the Retrospectives is Agile itself. How can we improve the process even better? Is there something that we have not yet identified? 

How can I start with Continuous Improvement?

So, getting into the How part of the retrospectives, luckily, almost everything has been said and drew about retrospectives.

Continuous Improvement in Scrum has some pretty famous retrospective formats.

Retrospective formats

If you want to look at some of those formats, here are some we show working effectively. We suggest some of the most famous Retrospective Formats, the "Mad, Sad, Glad," “4 Ls”, “Stop, Start, Continue,” “SailBoat.” Among them, some with a different flavor, “Appreciation Retrospective,” “The Self-Reflective Retrospective,” and the “Autonomy - Mastery - Purpose.”

Let's see a few things about those.

What is "Mad, Sad, Glad" retrospective?

This is one of the most often used Agile retrospectives.

Teams look for improvement from things that make them mad, sad, or glad. Ben Linders has written a great post about this retrospective format here.

What is "Start, Stop, Continue" retrospective?

Same idea as above. The team decides what to start doing, activities to stop doing, and things that need to continue.

You may have a look at a great post from Intercom here.

What is the "4 Ls" retrospective?

This is another type of retros where teams look for things they Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For in their iteration.

Then you act based on the shared results. Atlassian has a comprehensive article on how to run 4Ls here.

What is the "SailBoat" retrospective?

The SailBoat retrospective technique uses (what else...) a sailboat as a metaphor for the team. Teams like it because it is simple.

With this, you define a vision (where you want to go). Then you identify the risks in the path and, finally, what helps you achieve your objectives. If you want more, check the article from Miro here.

What is “Appreciation Retrospective"? 

As I described earlier, this kind of retro is a bit different.

It focuses exclusively on the positive experiences of the team. Have a look at this post by Luís Gonçalves.

What is “Self-Reflective Retrospective"? 

The goal of this retro is to drive the team to a mindset change. I wrote in the past a more comprehensive post on this here.

What is “Autonomy - Mastery - Purpose" retrospective? 

If you have also read Drive by Daniel Pink, you are familiar with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is the feeling of being autonomous, self-directed. Mastery is the feeling I am getting better at things that matter, by getting feedback. Purpose is knowing why I am doing something.

The goal of this retro format is to guide the team back to the fundamental factors that motivate them.

You can read more on how to run an Autonomy Mastery Purpose retrospective or this article on InfoQ.

What retrospective should I choose?

It is essential to pick a retrospective format that fits the team's current needs and context - technical or emotional. For example, an excellent fit for a team that goes through some tension is the “Appreciation Retrospective.”

Curious where to start? 

You can tweak your continuous improvement model to be more effective. In theory, you can read a ton of articles that you can try.

Though, getting the necessary principles and examples of cases that are battle-tested and from the trenches will help you evolve your organization faster and with more confidence.

If you are ready for this step, we built a "from the trenches" Continuous Improvement training online workshop. It is time to get things done!

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