While the idea of continuous improvement is important, we need to remember that humans aren’t machines. We need recovery periods built in to make real improvement over time.
If your team feels worn out, it’s not just you—and it’s not because you’re doing Agile wrong.
In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, we describe two simple, proven techniques to help teams recover from the constant pressure to improve. From refreshing your retrospectives to scheduling strategic “cool downs,” we show how small changes can make a big impact.
Give the techniques we’ve shared a try and let us know how it goes!
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Episode Transcript
Peter: Whether you’re following Scrum by the book or just in the groove of having regular retrospectives every week, it’s easy to fall into what we call continuous improvement fatigue.
Let’s be honest, we’re not built to relentlessly improve every day, every sprint, every month, without a bit of a break from time to time. Even elite athletes don’t train that way. They build recovery weeks into their training.
Richard: So should teams just take a couple weeks off? Well, I don’t know too many companies that would be excited about that prospect, but we have found two really effective ways to build recovery into a normal agile cadence.
These two techniques give teams the benefits of rest and recovery while still fitting into a standard scrum style flow. We’ll share those in today’s episode.
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Peter: Okay. We mentioned that elite athletes don’t train in some relentless, ever-increasing arc of improvement. Our bodies don’t respond well to that and neither do our minds.
Instead, athletes use training blocks that tend to ramp up over four to six weeks with recovery or taper weeks in between the blocks, and this has proven to be a much faster, more effective way to get long-term improvement, with fewer injuries and less burnout.
Richard: Elite teams, including yours, should do the same. We’ve seen two specific techniques that have made a real difference in reenergizing teams that may be suffering from continuous improvement burnout, kaizen fatigue, or retrospective ruts.
Peter: The first is to replace your next standard retro with an appreciative approach we call “We used to…, But now…”. The second is to schedule an entropy reduction sprint or what the Shape Up method calls a “cool down.”
Richard: I first used the “We Used To…, But Now…” format years ago when I sensed a team that I was coaching was feeling continuous improvement burnout, and it worked great. This team had been improving pretty steadily, sprint after sprint, for more than a year. I’d seen that they’d made a lot of progress in a lot of areas.
But you know how it is when you’re doing a little bit at a time; it’s like watching your kids or your pets grow up—you sort of forget what’s happening because it happens all the time right in front of your eyes. So I thought it would be useful to step back, zoom out, and see how much they’d accomplished.
So I put two columns up on the board: “We Used To…” and “But Now…”, and I asked the team, what are a few things that you like about how your work is right now? Those became the first few stickies for the “But Now…” column. Then I asked, “What was it like before, a year or two ago? What would somebody see that was different from what you see now?” and opened up brainstorming. We just got one thing after another—actually ran out of space on the board because there were so many things that had changed.
They needed to step back from the current state and see what it looked like before. Now we just, with that team, looked at how they’d changed, got the energy from appreciating it, and left it there. They just needed some encouragement and a little bit of a break from improvement.
I’ve used something similar with other teams since then, where we reflect on what’s on the board and look for additional things we can try. Like, what is this list telling us about something we can amplify? Where is something we could turn up the dial a little bit more? What’s something on here that could help us get unstuck somewhere else? And you can use that to get into an experiment that’s coming from a sense of what’s right and amplifying that, rather than a sense of what’s going wrong that we need to fix.
Peter: That’s nice. It has the advantage of slotting right into a standard scrum cadence. You don’t need to change anything but how you facilitate that retro that sprint. And you don’t have to focus on improvement for a change—just give everyone a breather and a chance to appreciate how far we’ve come as a team.
Richard: There are other ways to hold an appreciation-focused sprint retro. Techniques like a central chair or an Appreciative Inquiry approach are worth exploring. The nice thing about the “We Used To…, But Now…” model is that it doesn’t require much of an emotional lift to do it well. And if everyone is already a little fatigued, that’s a pretty essential benefit. It’s focused on objective improvements the team has made over time.
Peter: The second technique requires a little bit more buy-in from a Product Owner or maybe the organization’s management, but it’s the closest thing to what athletes do with a recovery week.
I first learned about this technique from Luke Hohmann, and he calls it an entropy reduction sprint. It’s basically a sprint where the Product Owner and business don’t add anything to the backlog. The team chooses how best to recover from a long haul of steady work and prepare for the next long haul.
They may choose to update some tools, clean up their desks, play around with some new technology, have a team lunch, do some maintenance or refactoring, or really whatever else they think would help them recover from weeks of hard work and prepare them for the next block of hard work.
Richard: This recovery period is also built into Basecamp’s Shape Up method where teams work on a Minimum Marketable Feature for six weeks, then take a cool down period for two weeks while leadership is shaping the next six-week feature.
Peter: Over time, entropy builds up, and we need time to reduce it, or it becomes like barnacles on a ship, slowing it down. So try an entropy reduction sprint if you can get buy-in from your leadership. If not, use the “We Used To…, But Now…” approach to add some more energy.
While the idea of continuous improvement is important, we need to remember that humans aren’t machines. We need recovery periods built in to make real improvement over time.
Richard: Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of The Humanizing Work Show. Let us know how you recover from long periods of hard work in the comments on YouTube or LinkedIn, and we’ll see you next time.
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