How Do You React to the ‘Small Things’ to be more Impactful without Becoming the Scrum Police?

In the last “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer” episode I got a question that was not answered during the session.
BTW: Here you find all Peter Gfader's podcasts.

So here are my thoughts:

Question:

There are some minor things that I’m in the moment unsure how to go about and if I should observe a behavior and bring it up in a retro or react immediately.
For example I observe during daily e.g. someone adds a story into the Sprint Backlog despite our team agreement to only have refined or estimated stories.
How do you react to the “small things” to be more impactful without becoming the police?

My thoughts:

Short answer

• Try to use the moment
• Use your gut feeling to decide
• Experiment and Inspect and Adapt

Long answer

Since I don’t work with a team fulltime I have a high tendency to almost always use the moment and situation to alert them on something I observe.

What I like doing is

1. Say ⛔  “Pause“.
   1. Everyone gets this immediately, you don’t even need to explain this.
2. Explain what you see, what it means to you.
   1. Maybe use Non Violent Communication to communicate your observation and request
3. Ask the team “Do you see this as well?“, “What could cause this?“
4. If something like this happened in the past, repeat the situation.
5. Based on possible outcomes you might ask the following:
   1. Negative outcome: ”What kind of problems would we run into if we did this?”
   2. Positive outcome: ”What else would improve if we did this?”

Maybe use the Sprint Retrospective to reflect back as a whole group.

What do you think?
What could we improve in that answer?

Let me know