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So, here I am in sunny Phoenix, Arizona, sitting in wonder among the participants at the 4th annual Retrospective Facilitator's Gathering (that Wiki is empty right now, but will soon be filling up).

Esther Derby is here, among other friends and colleagues who blog. She's suggested starting a gridblog on retrospectives - and I found myself with a few minutes before lunch...

The first "official" session of the Gathering, which is run as an Open Space conference, was convened by Linda Rising and was about one of the questions that form the structure of the retrospective inquiry - "What puzzles us". Further notes on that session later, but I had one thought during the session that I want to record here.

The "puzzles" question is important, it directs the attention of participants at a retrospective to aspects of their project that they might not consider under the headings "What worked well" and "What to do differently". We spent some time examining what makes for useful, powerful questions, and what role asking questions plays in eliciting and maybe resolving puzzles.

A retrospective is about telling the story of the project. The thought that struck me was - once you start telling a story, the story generates questions; "what happened next", "why did this person do that", "what did you see at that moment", and so on. But in an important sense the questions generate the story - drawing people's attention to things that you ask questions about is how the story comes into being.

There's a parlor game that involves asking someone to step out of the room, while someone in the group describes a dream she's had. Then when the person comes back into the room, he asks yes-or-no questions about the dream, in order to piece together the story. The trick to the game is this: there's no actual dreamer - what the group does is the following: if the inquirer asks a question such that the last letter of the last word in the question is in the first half of the alphabet, the group answers "Yes". If the letter is in the latter half of the alphabet, the group answers "No". What happens is that the inquirer "invents" the dream himself through the questions he asks...

When I say that the story creates the questions and the questions create the story, I mean it in that sense - although of course in the case of a project there's "real" events that happened. But to what extent the story remains "invented" or "shaped" by the questions we facilitators ask is... an interesting question.