Simon Baker
Posts: 1022
Nickname: sjb140470
Registered: Jan, 2006
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Simon Baker is an independent consultant, agile coach and scrum master
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What's The Prime Directive really about?
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Posted: Feb 20, 2008 8:34 AM
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An interesting conversation surfaced on InfoQ that questioned the Retrospective Prime Directive. I've paraphrased a lot of it here.
The Prime Directive says:
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. But we've all thought it - what about those people who aren't doing their best, who aren't pulling their weight, those people who are, from your perspective, being deliberately obstructive? Such people do exist although many would argue, that in their own way, they are trying to do their best. It's important that we recognise that our observations are subjective and are influenced by our prejudices.
The retrospective is about the collective retelling of a story for the purpose of learning and it's difficult to learn when people are blaming each other. It's much easier to influence someone or learn from them if you haven't written them off. The retrospective is not the place to conduct performance reviews on individuals. Keep that for one-to-ones. The Prime Directive asks us to suspend all of our suspicions and judgments about others for the short time that we are in the retrospective allowing our brains to focus elsewhere so that the team might just learn something.
Tags: retrospective, prime directive
Read: What's The Prime Directive really about?
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