Yay! Questions
Yay! Questions a Management 3.0 practice with powerful questions and impressive background, the 2 questions are:
- What did we do right?
- What did we learn?
The first question focused on best practices. The question is based on experimentation and the lessons learned from it.
How? Where? When? We can use the Yay! Questions. In retrospectives, you can make use of them, since in addition to raising awareness with the team about what happened, either in a Sprint or in a period, if we ask these 2 powerful questions we invite people to reflect, What was what we did right? Focusing on everything obtained, that is, we are going to recognize the activities in which the team excelled, are deliverable, be it a new process, a new method, but, we did it well!
Now once we collect the information about what we do well, how in the normal process of life, there are some occasions that we stumble and only then do we learn, this is where the next powerful question fits … What did we learn? That is, from what was done in that same Sprint or period, if we had any problem with any activity or task, the important thing is to identify why it happened to avoid that path, if we see it out of the box … We are within a continuous improvement circle based on the Deming cycle.
In a retrospective that I had the opportunity to facilitate with an excellent team, I decided to use Yay! Questions, because I was interested in knowing beyond the day to day what they thought, that is, raising awareness as a team about the path traveled to, based on the theory of empiricism, improving and becoming a high-performance team. The activity was carried out in Mentimeter, answering each question anonymously, with great participation from all the people. Once we had all the information, we devoted ourselves together to seek change actions to make commitments and improve as a team, as well as continue working with what we did well to do the same or even better, in summary Yay! Questions can greatly assist teams looking to become high-performance teams.
The retrospective in which I used this practice was different from the others we had had since the questions help you raise awareness of how you managed to get ahead despite the impediments with learning gained or discover that we did well to follow that formula towards success. Personally as a facilitator the Yay! Questions helped me to understand and detect the areas of opportunity in our work processes and the quick wins obtained by the team since by their nature the questions are not received as accountability or form of a report, but more as a point of heading towards continuous improvement based on feedback. A tip that can be used to facilitate this practice is to co-create the appropriate environment to apply these questions, which can be obtained through active listening to the team and its activities, not just asking and venturing to have answers. The learning obtained as a facilitator was to know the learning points beyond the day to day to have them as the input of information to improve, without a doubt I believe that I will use these questions more often and in my next work teams, not only in retrospectives but to incorporate them into the Daily Scrum Meetings, provided that as facilitators we can get to observe a different activity or point of improvement in what is shared by the team.
