Cross-Functional Retrospectives

A Simple Way to Manage Organisational Complexity

Retrospectives

We are all familiar with Retrospectives. They do come in many shapes (from what went well to a sailboat and beyond). Traditionally, during a Retro, a team reflects on their work and suggests improvements after completing a certain milestone or a sprint. Even though, a team might cover a topic of collaboration with other teams, the perspective would still be limited to a single team.

Organisation’s complexity, on the other hand, is caused by challenges in communication and interaction between different teams and functions, and thus requires to look beyond a single team. It requires to get perspectives from both sides.

During a conventional Retro the main focus is the team

Retrospectives do come with benefits. They provide a quick and continuous feedback flow which makes a team resilient. Leaders can then swiftly react and adapt to ever-changing environment. Retros also help to reveal hidden challenges or potential threats and many more. These benefits could and should be transferred from a single team to what General Stanley McChrystal would have called Team of Teams. This transfer can be achieved by organising a Cross-functional Retrospective.

Cross-functional

Combining different products and services into single offering, alongside increasing technological complexity and legacy, causes teams and employees with very different working methods, culture and mindset to get out of silos and start collaborating on daily basis. All this increases organisational complexity. Today it is not enough to improve or adapt a single team’s ways of work (especially when this was iterated and improved so many times already). Today the goal is to synchronise work processes, learn each others’ professional mindsets, align communications and culture between colleagues from different teams, units and functions. And cross-functional Retros is a simple and effective way to achieve this goal.

Cross-functional Retrospectives is a simple and effective way for a designer to manage organisational complexity.