Reauthoring Reality in Retrospect

Reauthoring Reality in Retrospect
October 3, 2003 Dave Hoover : Home

I hate to admit it, but my wife and I have been watching a lot of reality TV lately. While it is a well-known fact that the shows' producers carefully select scenes that will create a commercially rewarding storyline, it wasn't until last night that it finally sunk in that this process is similar to the social construction of reality that each of us experiences every day.

Reality TV producers have a dilemma. They must create a coherent story from the mountain of video footage generated during the filming of the show. Similarly, humans are confronted with the myriad experiences of our lifetimes. We could not possibly internalize all of the overwhelming richness of reality. Like reality TV producers, we piece together storylines in order to organize our experiences into understandable, coherent narratives. Unlike the producers, though, we do all of this "on the fly", or subconsciously. We don't often have the opportunity to reflect on or reconstruct the narratives that organize our perceptions.

Although this phenomenon touches every aspect of our lives, I've been focusing on facilitating retrospectives lately, considering how these notions of reality impact the stories that teams hold about software development projects.

Over the course of a project, the members of a team will individually develop their own stories about the project. Many individuals' stories will overlap. This overlap can happen because...

teammates derive stories from shared experiences.
teams inherit legacy stories, also known as dominant discourses, from their parent organizations.

Some individuals will develop stories about the project that are unique and unlike the stories of their teammates. This uniqueness can happen because...

individuals come to the project from diverse backgrounds, bringing in pre-existing notions of how teams interrelate to produce software.
the myriad events of a project offer an individual more experiences than she could possibly internalize. Each individual will choose which events will be storied, and which events will fall away.

Retrospectives offer opportunities to tend to the stories a team holds about a project. While retrospectives come in all shapes and sizes, from multi-day project retrospectives, to hour-long iteration retrospectives, one of their fundamental qualities is providing the team with a means of reflecting on their experience.

The develop a timeline exercise involves team members writing significant events on post-its, posting them on the wall to review as a team. Because no consensus is required for an individual to define an event as significant, the resulting timeline contains events that many teammates may have subconciously cast aside. By mining the timeline for gold, individuals' stories of the project are implicitly challenged. Previously ignored events might contradict dominant organizational discourses such as...

working late means working hard.
developers are poor visual interface designers.
managers can't code.
male programmers would rather code than speak.

It is critical to reflect on the contradictions between the events in the timeline and the legacies of the team and organization. The process thrives on the opening of new possibilities, the weakening of oppressive legacies, and the power of uncommon occurrences.

Yet unlike reality TV producers, retrospective facilitators have no agenda for what sort of storyline needs to be reauthored. They simply provide a reauthoring vehicle, collaborating with the team to find the team's preferred story about the project. While it might be tempting for a facilitator to put forth a seemingly obvious story of empowerment, explicitly contradicting the unhelpful story the team is clinging to, this is doomed to fail. Thoughtfully crafted exercises and questions will go further toward providing the team the opportunity to reflect and reauthor their personal and shared stories.

If you're interested in learning more about these ideas, I recommend the following books: