The Retromat-Blog
Great to see you at the Retromat-Blog! Here are some posts you might want to start with:
New to Retrospectives? Check out our series “Getting Started with Retrospectives“.
Part of a distributed team? Find all our posts about Remote Retrospectives here.
Or check out the latest posts:
[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]
‘Ello!
One of the main goals of a retrospective is to build shared understanding. That every participant contributes their unique perspective on events – things they observed and how they interpret them.
For this to happen, you need open conversations and those need trust from everyone involved. Trust that they won’t be blamed and trust that what they share will stay within the group.
That’s why some facilitators read out both the Prime Directive and the Vegas Rule in the beginning of every retrospective to remind everyone.
The Prime Directive (for retros, not Star Trek) was created by Norman Kerth (the godfather of retros – we owe him) to remind everyone to stay collaborative, constructive and focussed on the way forward rather than blame:
The thing is, we can’t change the past. But we can influence the future. Results are better if we stay curious rather than become accusatory – in retrospectives and most other situations in life as well.
(If you don’t like the specific wording of the Prime Directive, you’re not alone. Google for one of the many alternatives or come up with your own. Take care to keep the spirit intact!)
The second common ground rule is the
“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”
To enable candor and high levels of trust, retrospectives are confidential. You want people to openly share their thoughts. That is less likely to happen if they are afraid to feed the rumor mill. Be very careful how you use information gained during retrospectives outside of them. The only information that is okay to share outside of the retrospective are its action items.
Of course just reading these rules out will not turn an “unsafe” environment into one where people suddenly feel comfortable sharing. You might need to work on Psychological Safety first. It will help you create conditions for fruitful retrospectives:
Time to take a minute:
What’s the vibe in your team at the moment? Do you openly share information or are people guarded? How high do you think the Psychological Safety is? Are you happy with the current state?
May your retros always be high on trust and low on blame,
Corinna
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books
[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]
Hi, hello, welcome!
So far we’ve looked at the 5 phases and last week at a concrete plan to facilitate your first retro.
Surprise! This week I’ll circle back and make some adjustments because I’m not doing it “by the book”.
You see, the phases were meant to be linear and when I talk about them I usually keep up the appearance that I use them in sequence. But that’s not how I actually use them in the majority of my retrospectives – because I rarely run single-topic retros.
When Esther Derby and Diana Larsen wrote “Agile Retrospectives“, they had single-topic retrospectives in mind. In those, someone (often you) would set a topic and that’s the focus of the entire retro.
Whereas, when I facilitate a retrospective, teams usually cover several topics of their own choosing. By default, I run a “gathering potential topics”-activity like “Speedboat” or “I like, I wish” and then the team works through 2 to 4 of the gathered topics. That’s also what I recommend in the best retro for beginners
It would be strange to first talk about 3 topics in depth and afterwards come up with action items for all 3 of them in a separate activity. That’s why I use the phases with a bit of an inner loop:
We talk about 1 topic in depth and when the discussion has run it’s cause and the team votes to switch to the next topic, we’ll spend another 5 minutes on creating an action item for this topic. And only then do we start with the next topic.
Depending on whether you run single-topic or multi-topic retros, I thought it might be worth stating this explicitly.
Take a minute:
What type of retrospectives do you think makes the most sense in your situation?
Hope this helps,
Corinna
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books
[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]
Hello again!
Last week, I declared my undying love for Lean Coffee. This week, I’m sharing a concrete retrospective that you can use if you’re looking for a plan to dive in and facilitate your first retro.
Before we get to that, maybe you’re wondering, why I share a specific plan with you? Can’t you just open Retromat and presto: a plan for a retrospective?
Unfortunately, that is a terrible idea. Retromat is random. It combines the activities without any regard of them fitting together and most of them don’t. That is really easy to see for experienced facilitators and almost impossible to realize for beginners. Retromat was never meant for beginners.
Now that I got the disclaimer out of the way, here is my “Given that I know nothing about you or the team’s situation here’s my best shot at a multi-purpose, straightforward to facilitate” retro plan:
(If this is also the first retrospective for your team it’s probably a good idea to explain the purpose of a retrospective and to talk about keeping things confidential. We will cover the latter topic in two weeks.)
Set the Stage:
Positive & True
Why: Create a positive vibe and give everyone an opportunity to speak.
How: Think of a question that is tailored to get a response that is positive, true and about their own experiences, e.g.
Introduce the question and give a minute or two of time to think. Then ask your neighbor the question again. After answering, your neighbor asks their neighbor on their other side the same question and so on until everyone has answered and asked.
Everyone gets to participate right away, everyone gets a little boost and we set a positive tone for the retro.
Gather Data + Generate Insight:
Learning Matrix combined with Lean Coffee
Why: Learning Matrix is a great multi-purpose method that has “appreciation for others” built-in. I use it to gather topics and then use Lean Coffee to structure and time box the conversations about these topics.
How: Show a flip chart with 4 quadrants labeled ‘:)’, ‘:(‘, ‘Idea!’, and ‘Appreciation’. Hand out sticky notes.
Decide What to Do:
Worked Well, Do Differently
Why: Keep track of suggested action items
How: In preparation for the retrospective head 2 flip charts with ‘Worked well’ and ‘Do differently next time’ respectively. Write down suggestions for actions that people mention during Lean Coffee. State clearly that these are only suggestions for now. The team will vote on these later.
When all Lean Coffee time is talked up, ask if there are any more suggestions for actions. If so, let them write in silence for a few minutes – 1 idea per sticky note. Let everyone read out their notes and post them to the appropriate category. Lead a short discussion on what the top 20% beneficial ideas are. Hand out 3 dots for people to vote on which action items to try to distribute any way they like. (If you don’t have sticky you can also let people draw dots or lines with a marker.) The top 2 or 3 voted become your action items. Who is going to do them until when?
Closing:
AHA
Why: Share lessons learned and demonstrate the usefulness of retrospectives
How: Throw a soft ball around the team to uncover learning experiences. Give out 1 question at the beginning that people answer when they catch the ball, such as:
[It’s rare but depending on the question it might uncover events that are bugging people. If any alarm bells go off, clarify immediately and ask if you can follow up outside of the retro if need be.]
In many situations the above plan will result in a nice, effective retrospective for you and your team. If you use Miro as a digital whiteboard, I’ve prepared a Miroboard here that you can copy for free.
You need 90 minutes of time for this plan. It also makes good use of 120 minutes. I can squeeze it into 65 minutes if I have to.
Take a minute:
Can this plan work for you and your team? Which bits will you adapt for your context and why?
Facilitate a few retros to gain experience and when you run out of ideas, Retromat is always there to help. But please don’t use the first random plan you get! Adapt it to your and your team’s needs. And start out with simpler activities. Do not get overly excited with something like an elaborate superhero retrospective. Give everyone – yourself and the team – time to get familiar with the basic flow, voting mechanisms and such. You want them to be able to focus on the content, the problems they are trying to solve. They can’t do that if they are trying to figure out how a complicated activity works. When in doubt, pick something simple. If it goes well, you can try something more elaborate the next time.
That’s it for now, have a great week,
Corinna
PS: If you’d like some ready-made plans to get started, I wrote “Plans for Retrospectives” for this exact purpose.
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books
[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]
Hi there!
Last week, I talked about what a retrospective is and isn’t. Before we look at a concrete plan for a retro in next week’s post, I’d like to focus on just a part of that overall plan. A single method that I use all. the. time. Not just in retrospectives, in all kinds of meetings. It’s so versatile, it’s almost like magic – one of my all time favorite facilitation methods:
What’s it for, you ask? Excellent question!
Whenever you find yourself in a meeting without an agenda or clear topic, you can use Lean Coffee to create a prioritized list of topics in minutes. Time you easily gain back by staying relevant and fewer people zoning out.
With Lean Coffee you make sure you’re talking about things that the majority of people care about. With time boxes you make sure that the more outspoken people cannot keep a topic going that most participants have lost interest in.
1) Collect Topics
2) Prioritize
Boooyaa, there’s your prioritized agenda – reflecting interest in the topics \o/
3) Talk
Start discussing the top-voted topic. In the original description on LeanCoffee.org, you switch to the second topic, when the discussion peters out, and so on.
I always time box the discussions to make sure that no subgroup of people argues or rambles on forever about the same topic while everybody else is slowly falling asleep. My default time limits are:
Adjust these time limits to your context! If I know that a topic is highly controversial, I start with more time right away.
As a side effect, this method teaches two different ways of voting:
They are absolute facilitation basics that every team should know for less aimless talking and faster decisions.
In every discussion that you ever facilitate it is hugely beneficial if you introduce turn taking so that people who are comfortable with interrupting others will not bulldoze over those participants who are not. Turn-taking is even more important in remote settings. Raising your hand (either physically or digitally) to indicate that you want to speak and waiting for your turn, knowing that your team members will let you speak – that is a gamechanger. Going from the chaos of caucus to taking turns is simple and powerful.
Take a minute:
I can’t wait for next week, when we’ll work through a specific plan to run a retrospective *excited*
Cheers from Germany,
Corinna
PS: Most of this email is an excerpt from my free ebook “Facilitation is a Team Sport“
PPS: A word on time keeping: If you are co-located, invest in a Time Timer. It’s an egg timer on steroids. It’s the clearest and easiest way to countdown time I’ve found so far. They are pricey (last I checked, about 60$) and they are worth every cent!
It’s super easy to set the time (you pull out the red disk) and it’s highly visible. Everybody is aware of how much time is left. Really helps with (self-)discipline. When the time is up, it beeps and nobody needs to be the bad guy that interrupts.
If you’re remote, check out the tools you are using for their time keeping features, e. g. I use the timer in Miro. Timers are also available in Mural and Conceptboard.
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books
[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]
Hiho friend,
so, you might already know the basics and the standard five phases of retrospectives, but just in case you don’t (or if you’d like a refresher), let’s go through them and lay the foundation for the rest of the course:
It’s an opportunity to reflect, learn and improve as a team. It is time set aside – outside of day-to-day routine – to reflect on past events and behaviors. In its simplest form you answer three questions:
In non-agile environments retrospectives are sometimes done after a project is finished as a “post mortem” to derive “lessons learned”. Those tend to be long meetings.
In contrast, in agile environments, a retrospective is short and done often (e.g. 90 minutes at the end of a 2-week sprint). Thus the project is still in progress and you can address issues jeopardizing the project’s success in time, hopefully keeping it on track. Additionally, you get into the habit of reflecting and improving, like a muscle that you train.
In Scrum, retrospectives belong to the cast of regular sprint meetings. In Kanban there’s a variety of ways to “schedule” retrospectives. In Lean, A3’s can serve the same purpose.
“The team” – whoever that includes in your context. In Scrum it’s usually the whole Scrum team with dev team, PO and SM. If you have a specific topic that includes / affects people from outside the team, invite them to that retrospective to work on a joint solution.
If you are working in a structure that has team leads/managers, it is not uncommon to exclude them hoping it will make it more likely that people speak up. I’m wary of that because these roles typically have to offer a lot of perspective. If your team goes the exclusion route, try to also have retrospectives with them at least quarterly and see what happens.
In its simplest form, the relevant people
Usually retrospectives are a little more sophisticated than that. Most follow the five phases suggested in “Agile Retrospectives“ (the quasi standard book on retros):
You can support each phase with activities to spark ideas and interactions. (That’s what Retromat is for 🙂
Take a minute:
How do the retrospectives you’ve taken part in (or even facilitated) compare to the above? Which of the basics did you already know? What was new?
By the end of this course, we will have covered everything you need to know to run retrospectives that make a positive difference in your team’s work life! I’m really looking forward to it!
PS: Here’s a 1-page summary of retrospectives, should you ever need it – for yourself or to teach others:
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books
Hello there,
welcome to my course about retrospectives, friend! There will be a new topic every Tuesday for the next 20 weeks:
Disclaimer: this course will be biased. I started out writing a neutral course and it did not feel right. Because, I would write down one thing and then go do something else in practice. So I scratched that first version and we’ll be doing it differently:
Imagine you have just started as my colleague. It’s your first position as a Scrum Master (or Agile Coach or …) and I’m supposed to show you how to facilitate effective retrospectives. It’ll be very personal, very “this is how I do it in this specific context, your context might be different. Another way to do it is …”.
If you were my colleague, we’d set up a weekly meeting and each time I will teach you something from my 15 years of experience. In between you’ve got time to try things out because no amount of reading will magically make you a good facilitator. You have to actually do it – put it into practice, see what works, what doesn’t and adjust accordingly.
If you’re serious about improving your skills, block half an hour in your calendar every week for the next 20 weeks. These 30 minutes gives you time to read, put everything into your context and pick something to try.
If a calendar entry won’t work for you, what else can you do to increase the odds of you engaging with this course to learn how to better support your team with retrospectives?
Next Tuesday we’ll explore what retrospectives are all about – the foundation of everything. Hope to see you there,
Corinna
PS: A BIG thank you to my test readers who made this course MUCH better:
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books
When you let the writing on whiteboards stay on for long enough – say, a couple of month – dry-erase markers stop being “dry-erase” and start being “leave unwipeable shadowy traces behind”. You’re left with an unsightly board, no matter how often you wipe. Water doesn’t help, at least not against dried up German Edding markers.
Even worse are traces of the slim tape that some teams use to create tables on their boards. Its remains are stickier than candy floss and way uglier.
Fear not, my colleague Frieda has the miracle cure: Clean your whiteboard with “Wepos Kunstoffreiniger” (= Wepos plastics cleaner) and it will become perfectly clean and smoother than a baby’s butt. Way smoother, actually.
That’s also the catch: After wiping your board with the cleaner you have to wipe it with water. Otherwise no sticky note will stick to the board. Try it, it’s quite fascinating. The sticky notes fall right off of the infinitely smooth surface.
If you don’t have tape traces you can also get rid of the old marker markings with a wet microfibre cloth. Again, kudos to Frieda for finding this trick.
The very last resort, for people without any equipment, is ye olde overwriting trick: Retrace the old writing with a whiteboard marker. The solvents in the marker’s color will also work on the old markings and make them wipeable again. It’s works, it’s just tedious.
Do you have any neat tricks for cleaning dried-in markers?
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books
About a year ago, I created a GIANT miro board with templates for all activities in English, and today, almost exactly a year later, there is now a German version, thanks to Agnes Fleischer, who localized the board.
Check it out, it’s so shiny!
For the longest time, I thought “company-wide retrospectives = “normal retros, but scaled up with activities that work for big groups and lots of breakout sessions”. If you had asked me if it’s a good idea to do company-wide retros every once in a while I would have said yes. Retros are always a good idea in my book – as long as they enable change.
Did sipgate (my place of work for more than a decade) do company-wide retrospectives? No, only on the team level. Was it a problem? Also no – except for a few exceptions. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that the reason there were relatively few unaddressed problems was that THERE WERE COMPANY-WIDE RETROSPECTIVES. But I didn’t see that because it was a completely different mechanism. It served many of the same purposes, though: The Open Friday.
“Every other Friday, everyone at sipgate is free to do what they think is most valuable for the company. Additionally we hold an Open Space – a spontaneously organized conference. Everybody who wants to take part gathers for the opening ceremony at 10am and participants announce their sessions, bit by bit creating a schedule for several rooms and timeslots. Attendance is 100% voluntary. Participants visit the sessions they are interested in.” – Paraphrased from OpenFriday.org
Actually, it’s not that similar: the Open Friday (OF) fulfills A TON of different purposes. I think that’s why it took me so long to see that it ALSO serves as company-wide retrospectives, because it so much more than that. But hosting company-wide retrospectives is probably the biggest chunk of value the OF adds:
That big dark green circle are sessions along the lines of “I’ve noticed that X. I think this is a problem because Y. I’d like to talk about whether it is a problem and if so, what we can do.” These are the sessions that fulfill many of the same purposes that retrospectives fulfill in a team. The topic is set beforehand and everybody interested in it will self-select to attend. With the people there you build a shared understanding with many different views of the topic and explore different solutions.
The best way to hold a company-wide retrospective might look different from what you think. It certainly looks different from what I used to imagine.
In hindsight it’s quite ironic: “Open Friday” is easily the “hack” in my / the sipgate book “24 Work Hacks” that people get most excited about. That’s the one they want to copy. I was always a bit sad on behalf of retrospectives, because that would have been my pick. And it wasn’t until years later that I finally realized that people DO pick retrospectives, it’s just that they need something to address company-wide issues a lot more than something usually used at the team level. It makes total sense to me now. Most hard problems are bigger than a single team.
Since it took me so long to get to this major light bulb moment, I thought I’d share with you.
PS: You don’t need start holding an Open Space every 2 weeks to get the benefits. You can start a lot smaller. Find tips on Open Friday.org (which was also written by me, back in the day).
What if you could have better discussions as a team – shorter and with more shared information? With or without a facilitatior. And if you yourself are the facilitator: What if your life could be easier?
Please welcome my FREE new mini book 🙂
It introduces techniques to improve your co-located discussions. We’ll look at
Check out “Facilitation is a Team Sport”
PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books
