[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