The retro that made everyone warm and fuzzy inside

As I have mentioned before, although I'm not the scrum master of our team, I have volunteered to facilitate our retros...and I've done it for almost 6 months, but then I felt a bit drained and I asked my teammates for help. I thought I needed a couple of sprints to recharge my creative batteries, but honestly, I feel like I still need some more time. 

Anyway, my dear friend Korcholis (probably my best friend at work, but don't tell him) volunteered to facilitate some retros and they were good. They made everyone in the team sigh and be all "aww I love you all", which was beautiful and felt great, but being the flawed person I am, I felt a bit jealous (and feeling jealous made me feel small). 

Jealous? Why? Well, because I've been trying to get the team to reach that climax for almost 6 months and I felt weird that someone else achieved it. Since Korcholis and I are the kinds of friends who can be honest with each other, I confessed my jealousy to him, and guess what he said? 

"First of all, all processes are long and sometimes they take time. The fact that they said that when I was facilitating it might only because I was "a new person" facilitating the retros, but the whole effect came from before.

Second, if you hadn't brought games and 'emotional things', I wouldn't have brought games and emotional things. To be honest, when I was officially responsible of facilitating the retro, every day before starting work I'd look for metaphors about how to split tasks in "good" and "bad" and that's it, but afterward, once I started looking for games, I realized that splitting positive and negative things of the sprint into two columns was not the most important part...the most important part was to see how we work as a team.

Third, I know you don't like to hear this, but you can't allow someone's words to affect you. [...] Fourth, don't say you feel small, imagine you teach someone how to ride a bike. Will you feel small because that person knows how to ride a bike now? Will you feel small when someone tells them "Wow! Well done! You ride your bike so well!"...of course not. You should feel proud of being such a good teacher."

I must admit that, after those words, I felt a bit emotionally manipulated to feel proud of my work and happy about what had happened... After all, he's really smart and he'd know how to cheer me up, but he made a good case.

We're finally riding the bike together (sometimes).

Hi, how are you? For real, how ARE YOU?

I think that by now, my teammates know exactly which post-its are mine because of how personal they are. I don't know if this is right or wrong, but if it is true that we need to focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools then I will...because I care. Deeply. 

Last week was a bit weird, not only because of the whole pandemic situation that is making a lot of us feel like we're riding an emotional rollercoaster, but also because my grampa broke his hip and he was taken to the hospital to the intensive care unit (He's alright and he's back at home now, thank you for asking telepathically). I was a bit mopey last week and feeling all sorts of guilt.

I felt guilty because I am the favorite grandchild (oh yes, yes I am) and I used to spend lots of time with my grandparents before I moved to Spain, but I can no longer spend time with them or teleport (now THAT would be the solution to my problem). I have been calling them every single Sunday at 5pm their time for five years though. They love it, I love it.

I felt guilty because I was executing a pretty long manual regression run and it was taking me forever to finish, and my mind wasn't helping much either. 

I felt guilty because our biggest consumer base is iOS, and I test our iOS apps. Did I want to mark a test case as passed but not test it well? Hell no, that's not me. I'd rather take my time than giving my word on something that I haven't checked properly. However, when I can't focus I don't remember what I did and so I need to do it again. Yes, I do take notes. Yes, I'm distracted anyway, especially when I get interrupted on Slack.

I felt guilty because I wasn't allowing myself to understand that it is OK if you're not giving your 100%. This situation is effing different from anything we've been through before. Some of us live in countries that are going through hell right now, while our families are in poorer countries whose hell would be ten times worse, did COVID-19 hit them. 

So there I was, feeling guilty when I saw a pair of eyes rolling whenever I said I wasn't done with our regression yet (I might be paranoid and maybe no eyes were rolled...maybe my guilt was playing tricks on me)...and I wanted to cry a bit, tell them that I felt under pressure, that I wanted to perform and out-do myself but that my heart was breaking because I was terrified that my 94-year-old grandpa would die and that I wouldn't even get to say goodbye on the phone because mobiles are not allowed in the intensive care unit (because phones are dirty and we know it).

We had our retro yesterday, and fortunately, I wasn't the retromaster* this time. I wrote that pink post-it note and deleted it. Wrote it again, deleted it. Wrote it again, deleted it. I finally was eggsy enough to do it.  I told my teammates that I wanted to explain why I was acting the way I was acting last week. I told them that I was embarrassed about telling them about my grandfather and how that was eating me from the inside out because I was afraid that they would think it was an excuse for being lazy. I just couldn't focus. I told them that we are transparent about each other's work every day at the daily stand-up but are we transparent about how we're feeling? I think we should because being agile means adapting, right? We don't see each other's faces all the time, we don't see each other's body language anymore...so we might as well ask each other how we're doing and mean it. Oh, and create a psychologically safe space so we can actually tell the truth if we want to and not just answer "Fine".

Who would have thought that a tiny post-it note could be so emotionally liberating?

*Retromaster: I have volunteered to facilitate our retros and I've been doing it for 7 months but I was running out of my creative juices so I asked for help last sprint and said I needed someone else to facilitate them for a sprint or two. A big shoutout to my buddy who volunteered as tribute. You rock.