Many in the Agile community are unfamiliar with Transformative Learning Theory, which explains how adults change their thinking. Papers submitted to the Agile learning track in past years have seldom, if ever, mentioned transformative learning. Transformative learning is about how adults transform the frames of reference through which they view and interpret their lived experience. Transformation and transformative learning can be sudden—for instance, a change in perspective that comes with the loss of a job, the birth of a child, a major change in a customer relationship —or it can be gradual, unfolding over a longer period of time. When it occurs, though, the transformation is holistic and enduring, fundamentally changes the way we understand and make meaning of our experience, and results in new action in life and ways of working.

We know we’ve undergone a learning transformation when we simply can’t go back to our former modus operandi. The way we see things, and as a result do things, has fundamentally changed.

Groups and teams that engage in critical self-reflection provide a particularly unique and potent container for transformative learning. The Agile Retrospective—with its intention and attention to the Agile team reflecting on their way of working in order to improve—is a perfect container for stimulating transformative learning.

This workshop guides participants through a process for viewing the Agile Retrospective through the lens of transformative learning in order to design Transformative Retrospectives. We’ll deconstruct a typical Retrospective process with an eye toward where transformative learning can or may already be happening, and provide tips and specific practices that a Scrum master or other facilitator can utilize to encourage and enhance transformative dialogue and learning.