Applying Yay Question practice to gain knowledge linked to our purpose
When something is going wrong or when there are a lot of problems it’s better to focus on purposes with a positive perspective. A positive perspective encourages us to continue. According to Mayo Clinic’s article, positive thinking helps us with stress management and can even improve our health. The most important benefits are:
- Increase lifespan
- Lower rates of depression
- Lower levels of distress
- Greater capacity to face difficult situations
To change negative thinking to positive thinking, it’s required to concentrate on some key insights, such as:
- Identify areas to change; areas in which you usually think negatively about.
- Check yourself periodically and identify negative thinking that you need to change.
- Be open to humor, mainly in difficult times.
- Practice positive self-talk.
If we move to work environments, we can find a lot of people with negative thinking. After all, a company is a group of people that works for goals, and as human beings, they have emotions, thoughts, frustrations, and more.
If you are a Change Agent, it’s a good idea to transform negative thinking into positive thinking. That will allow you to focus on your goals with more motivated people.
But, what could you use to focus on the purpose and positive thinking? And the answer is: Yay Questions of Management 3.0
The Yay Questions is a practice in which two main questions are asked in order to reflect on past situations independently of how everything went through. The questions are:
Victory Bell of Management 3.0
- What did we do well?: It focuses on what things we did well and what practices we applied correctly.
- What did we learn?: It allows concentrating on our learning.
When answering both questions, you can find reasons to celebrate, using the ring of a victory bell, a round of applause, beers, etc.
If you want to elaborate on the practice and have more information, you can go to https://management30.com/practice/yay-questions/
I had the opportunity to apply this practice with a CoE (Center of Excellence) composed by four Agile Coaches. Their goals were to:
- Coach teams in Agile Frameworks (started and scaled).
- Mentor teams to enhance their productivity.
- Measure levels of maturity.
- Mentor in Agile Portfolio.
- Promote the adoption of metrics, Ux, Cx, OKRs, and others
- Enhance the alignment between the product increments and corporate strategy.
I’m working in a transformational process in a financial company, and I’m getting involved in different teams that are going through their learning and including agility in their routine. I worked together with the CoE for almost a year and I thought that was an appropriate moment to reflect on the process and the milestones reached.
As CoE, they were through different kinds of situations. Some situations were successful and made them happy but, others weren’t because they crashed with a pre-existing culture that was vertical and hierarchical.
As a Change Agent or Agile Coach maybe you know a lot about agility and you are certified as a specialist in different frameworks, but you need to understand that a great part of the knowledge is acquired through your experience in the process. The experience is crucial to achieving desired results.
I designed a session with four sections:
- Introduction: Here I described the session, the expected outcomes, the timebox, and each person’s responsibilities.
- Reflection: Here, I asked three relevant questions about past experiences to allow their reflection on those experiences. The questions were:
- What do you want to stop doing?
- What do you want to recycle?
- What do you want to incorporate into the process?
- Yay question: Here, I asked the two questions of the practice. The questions were:
- What did we do well?
- What did we learn?
- Start Doing: Here, I called them to action and asked them to plan with the learning gained in the previous step. I named this section “For the future” and tried that they placed post-its with actions achievable in a short time.
The meeting ended in one hour and some of the results are the following:
At the end of the session, the Agile Coaches had purposeful conversations about their experiences and achieved effective learning related to their main goal: the agile transformation of the company. Then, they turned those ideas into a set of post-its with actions on the digital board in the Start Doing column.
They understood what they wanted to stop doing; what they wanted to recycle and improve, and what they wanted to add to their daily work. Additionally, they reflected on what they did well and what they wanted to improve in the transformation process.
As a Facilitator, I’ve learned that a very simple practice with two relevant questions can produce great results that allow us to match the efforts with the purpose. Additionally, when we apply positive thinking, we can go through stressful situations in the transformational process more easily.
In future work sessions, I will use the Yay Questions with Celebration Grids (https://management30.com/practice/celebration-grids/) and will see how to operate booth tools together.
Finally, I suggest that you take into consideration this simple and powerful tool in any meeting where you want to create a work environment of reflection and learning. So, go on and try it, you will not regret it.
