Author: Corinna Baldauf

[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:

So, what is a retrospective exactly?

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:

• What worked well?
• What didn’t work well?
• What are we going to do differently?

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.

Who takes part?

“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.

What does a retrospective look like?

In its simplest form, the relevant people

• meet and engage with others
• talk about stuff and
• agree on some actions (that will hopefully improve the situation).

Usually retrospectives are a little more sophisticated than that. Most follow the five phases suggested in “Agile Retrospectives“ (the quasi standard book on retros):

1. Set the stage
   Give people time to “arrive” and get into the right mood; Set the goal
2. Gather data
   Help everyone remember; Create a shared pool of information (everybody sees the world differently)
3. Generate insight
   Why did things happen the way they did? Identify patterns; See the big picture
4. Decide what to do
   Pick a few issues to work on and create concrete action plans of how you’ll address them
5. Close the retrospective
   Clarify follow-up; Appreciations; Clear end; How could the retrospectives improve?

You can support each phase with activities to spark ideas and interactions. (That’s what Retromat is for 🙂

What is a retrospective NOT:

• A blame game – Retrospectives are not about ass coverage and assigning blame. In fact, some facilitators start their retrospectives by reading out the “Retrospective Prime Directive“:
  
  “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
  
  Focus on what you will do in the future. We’ll come back to this in a later post.
  
• Just another meeting in which talk is cheap but no change follows – If the retrospectives don’t produce concrete actions or if no one ever carries them out afterwards, retrospectives are a waste of time.

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: If you'd rather read this Guide as an ebook, click here. Or go all in and get it as part of the Retromat eBook Bundle at a discount. A purchase also supports Retromat as a whole 🙂

“We don’t need regular retrospectives. Can’t we just do them, when we need them?”

In my mind that always translated to “We will not do retros while problems are small. We will wait until it’s way too late and our problems are very big and intimidating and much more difficult to resolve.”

But at Agile Coach Camp Germany 2023 Falk Kühnel told me of an interesting way to “schedule” retrospectives at irregular intervals and it’s the first time I think that it might work. You just need a Jenga tower.

You set up the tower in the team room and play a game of Jenga (pull a brick, put it on top of the tower) drawn out over several weeks. When the tower falls over that’s your cue to schedule a retrospective ASAP. You pull a brick when:

• Daily standup is over
• A “disruption” happens – A disruption is something annoying / hindering that the team wants to keep track of. If it happens often, the Jenga tower topples earlier and you talk about the pattern of disruptions. (What is considered a disruption should change over time as old issues get resolved and new ones arise.)
• Someone feels a retrospective should happen earlier rather than later

There is also an emergency override: If something drastic happens that one of the team members think warrants a conversation right fucking now, they can topple the entire tower to make the retrospective happen ASAP.

This mechanism is the brainchild of Timo Zimmermann and it’s the first time I’m in love with any alternative to regular retrospectives. It has a time component, because at least one brick moves every day and then several ways to speed things up, according to the team’s needs. 

Timo shares that they’ve used the Jenga tower for more than a year and would have continued if Covid hadn’t happened. The tower’s success was underlined by the fact that the table it stood on was cluttered in the beginning and then gradually cleaned up as the tower got pride of place.

Other evidence: When they successfully solved a type of disruption, the team picked new ones. And the utterance “arg, nah, I don’t wanna do a retro” became a thing of the past.

Thank you, Timo & Falk for sharing with us!

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