A colleague of mine sent me a posting on retrospectives the
other day that contained the following perspective on the prime
directive:
The prime directive is
a very deliberate request for us to suspend disbelief. Let's pretend that for
the next two hours, or whatever the duration of the retrospective, that we will
openly accept that everyone in the room has acted with the best of intentions
in a way that was in line with their best efforts and abilities. Of course,
this is naive, but let's consider it a little mental challenge. Let's take all of our suspicions and
judgments about the others in the room and try to turn them on their heads and
try to figure out *how* someone could behave in that way and it being in line
with their best efforts. It’s a very challenging thing to do as every core of
our being believes the opposite.
What?!?!? I couldn’t
disagree more with this view. I have
never felt that the prime directive required suspension of disbelief. I don’t think that was Norman's intent when he wrote it, although I
still have to read this book.
To me the prime directive is all about putting yourself in
the other person's shoes. The great
majority of people in this world want to do a good job and try to do a good
job. Sometimes other things get in the
way, but they don't want them too. In
all my years on the job I've never worked with a person who was trying to be
subversive on a software team. Subversive
team members shouldn’t attend the retrospective, because they should already have been let go. I've dealt with slackers and poor
performers, but normal people don't want to fail and don't spend their energy
trying to sabotage the team. Generally,
they either don't know how to do a good job or are not focused on the job at
hand.
Unfortunately, many times people fail to put themselves in
the other person's shoes. People tend to
look at a failure and tend to blame the person. Assigning blame doesn't help a team improve
how they work and learn from its experience. The point is to look a little deeper. Determine how to help the team, and potentially an individual, from
letting the same issue continually cause problems.
The prime directive definitely won't work if you just read
it at the beginning of a meeting. It
will work if you read it at the beginning of the meeting and actually BELIEVE
what you are saying. I believe in my
team members. Do you?
