In a article at the Six Sigma IQPC site, Christian Loyer offers a new twist on the old fishbone diagram root cause analysis approach.
He describes the usual application of a fishbone diagram for digging in to solve a problem. In addition to Ishikawa's Ms for manufacturing fishbones that Christian mentions, I've also used Ps or Ss. You don't have to stick with these. Try to think of all the factors present in your organizational system that can affect your current project, and come up with your own fishbone alphabet. :)
During a retrospective, the traditional fishbone works as a team activity for Generating Insights to help the group reflect on the data the they've gathered and dig into the root causes of issues.
However, Mr. Loyer offers a new way of applying this technique. He calls it the reverse fishbone and uses it to help a group anticipate what's to come and make plans for helping their project succeed. As a project manager, he notes that using this technique collaboratively helped him to perceive the project in a different way and understand needs he might otherwise have overlooked.
Consider using this reverse fishbone activity in your next retrospective to Decide What to Do by envisioning actions that could move the team closer to their goals.
A Flexible Framework for Agile Retrospectives:
Set the Stage Gather Data Generate Insights Decide What to Do Close the Retrospective
For more retrospective activities, check out the "retrospectives" category on this site.
Comments
This is most of the way to Future Perfect Planning, which starts by imagining a successful project and then projects backwards to look for ‘causes’ and key decisions. It’s a powerful technique to get a team to step out of short-sighted, near term thinking. (The Innovation Games “Remember the Future” is based on Future Perfect Planning.)
Yes, it is similar. It’s good to have several variations on these techniques in our “toolkits”.
Working a lot with innovation and creative techniques, the fishbone to me is a creative tool for “structured” brainstorming, even if that sounds contradictory.
Normally in brainstorming people first come up with ideas in a divergent phase, and then group them into categories.
In a fishbone you come up with the grouping first and then brainstorm within those categories, to make sure you cover all categories (and nothing else), which means you are a bit more narrow, creatively speaking, but on the other hand you make sure you cover the areas you want.
If you see the fishbone like that you can use it in any setting where you need to brainstorm or explore a topic, whether you are looking back or looking forward. E.g. I have used a fishbone were I put the LEAN waste categories as categories to identify waste.