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7. Other factors – How I plan a retrospective

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Hello again!

Here’s the hodgepodge of topics that I didn’t want to squeeze into last week’s post on how I pick activities. It depends on your context how much of my process might apply to you but at the very least you will know one way to do it and can figure out your way from there.

So, other factors to take into consideration, when choosing activities:

Are there activities that will be accepted better than others?

  • What’s the attitude towards retros? Do people want to take part?
  • Have individual people expressed preferences?

I cater towards wishes unless I think they are harmful. There are teams who crave novelty and are eager to try “crazy” stuff. There are teams that dislike “creative” association games.

There was one person who was okay-ish with stuff like “If the sprint was a food, what kind of food would it be?” as long as they didn’t have to come up with it on the spot. So as soon as I had picked my “Set the Stage”-activity, I would slack the prompt to them in advance. Half an hour was enough. I got to do whatever check-in I wanted and they got to be comfortable with it. It worked for both of us. The rest of the team knew of our compromise and never wanted in on the “spoiler”.

How experienced are the participants with group discussions? 

  • Are they already good co-facilitators? Do they take turns talking? Do they start clustering similar topics on their own?
  • Do they know basics like dot-voting?

The less experienced the team is with retrospectives, the more time you need to plan in for explanations. Check out my free book Facilitation is a Team Sport to find out more about how to make your life easier:

How’s the power (im)balance?

  • Are there formal hierarchies at play? Informal ones like seniority, some job roles being taken more seriously than others? 

Ways to counteract imbalances:

  • More written activities – makes people less likely to withdraw something in premature conformity/alignment
  • More anonymous activities
  • Outside of the retro: Ask more influential people to go late or last in round-based activities
  • Does it make sense to run the occasional retro without the team lead (or similar)?
  • Work on Psychological Safety (we’ll cover that in a later email) but ONLY if it is actually safe for everyone to speak up

Pay attention to other things that might surface in subtle ways (sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, …). It doesn’t have to be an active thing by anyone: The way we are all raised makes some people more comfortable with taking up time and space than others, and some people’s voices get more amplified because of what they look like. 

What about posting an agenda?

Some people whose work I greatly admire, post an agenda everytime. I rarely do, because my retros are on the shorter side, I work with teams long-term and everybody quickly learns the underlying structure.

When I work with a team that is new to retrospectives, I will talk briefly about the steps we’ll go through at the beginning and mention what times I’ve planned the breaks for. Other than that, I usually only post agendas for workshops upwards of 2 hours. 

Because this course is a lot of “I do it this way” I’d like to explicitly state that for many, many of my approaches I also know someone who goes about it completely differently and it also works. For them. It might not work for me because I’m different or because my team is different. There are a lot of ways to be a good facilitator and there are a lot of different teams out there. You’ve got to find an approach and style that works for you and your team. And I think you’re gonna rock it!

Take a minute:
Think about your team for a bit: What kind of activities would they love to participate in?
And what’s the internal power structure? How can you make sure that everyone gets heard?

On that note, I bid you farewell! In the next email we’ll dig a bit more into preparing a co-located retrospective. See ya,

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

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6. Picking activities – How I plan a retrospective

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Hiho,

Today, I’ll share what I do when I sit down to plan a retrospective. This post originally was so exceedingly long that I decided to split it. Today will focus on picking activities and the next one will be a bit of a mixed bag of “oh, you might also want to consider this”.

Anyway, the first thing I do is look up what activities I used with this team last time and the times before that. My memory is like Swiss cheese so I note down which activities I do with a team for each retro. I don’t want to repeat myself too much or too early so that people stay engaged by new activities. I currently facilitate remote retros and just keep all of the retros for one team in the same big digital board – hey, presto: automatic archive 🙂

If I run the retrospective for more than one team, I tend to reuse a plan once for each team, unless there’s something specific to tailor to a team, either their current situation or their identity. When a team’s name is meaningful, I love to riff off on it. The team name is the name of an art movement? Better believe I bring pics of significant works every time. (Completely unrelated side note: I have weird niche knowledge about Dadaism.) Pokemon? Asterix? I will reference the hell out of these to support a shared identity.

Apart from that, my retrospectives all tend to follow the same basic layout that you’ve already seen in my previous emails:

1) Set the stage

I try to vary the focus e. g. in one retro focusing on feelings, in the next one on the sprint results, next one just for fun, and so on. My check in is often independent of whatever follows after. This is not what I would recommend. If you can make the check-in relate to what follows, that would be better. (But I’m honest here and that includes pointing out things I could improve on.)

1.5) Revisit the action items from last retro

Sometimes I bring back our decisions from the last retro to check whether we implemented them and if so, how our experiments worked out. More on that later in the course.

2) Gather topics

I haven’t worked closely with a team in years, which means that I don’t experience the daily routines of the teams I facilitate retros for. If there is a major disruption, I’ll hear about it but small stuff will pass me by unnoticed. That’s why 99% of the time I will use generic topic gathering activities so that the team can set the agenda.

If a team asks me to focus on a specific topic, I ALWAYS follow that request and will tailor all the activities towards that – up to and including creating new activities.

If you are sitting with your team every day you will likely observe things that prompt you to plan retros to address specific pain points more often than me in my more detached role. For inspiration, you can check out “Plans for Retrospectives”.

3) My Inner Loop

4) Closing

I usually ask about something the participants learned during the retrospective. Occasionally I will ask about how to improve the way I facilitate. When I start facilitating for a team, I will ask about the latter more often.

My inner loop is fixed. For all the other parts I open Retromat (yeah, I really scratched my own itch with that one) and use the arrows to step through the activities in the given phase until I find one that fits. For the “Gather topics” activity I’ll peruse both “Gather Data” and “Generate Insight” because the lines are blurry with those two.

When I’m done, I look at all the activities together. Does the plan as a whole make sense or is there an abrupt change in topic? E.g. I would not start with Amazon Review and then follow it with Movie Critic. 

Above, I’m sharing the retrospectives that I actually run, not the ones I think I should be running. Because I think I should run retros that adhere to the “5 phases” ideal from “Agile Retrospectives”. Yet, my retros have no 1:1 mapping of activities to match these phases: phases 2-3-4 are usually kind of merged without each of them having a specific activity dedicated to them *shrug*

Again, this is due to the fact that in my retros the team set multiple topics. It is what it is. And it has served my teams and me quite well. 

Do the activities fit timewise?

Next, I check that the plan roughly fits into the available time. How long are your team’s retros? 

The shortest retros I ever ran were 30 minutes. That actually worked because it was weekly and there were only 3 people who were quite aligned already.

For the biggest chunk of my facilitator life, I was on a 1 hour schedule for a 2 week sprint. That was always tight. We routinely took 65 minutes and I routinely dropped the closing activity due to time pressure 🙁

Then I moved to a team with 90 minute retros every 2 weeks and that worked much better. At my new workplace it’s 120 minutes once per month which also feels more relaxed and we sometimes finish ahead of time. I don’t think I ever want to go back to less than 90 minutes.

Whatever timeframe you are working with, roughly estimate how long each phase will take and thus how much time you can allot to the inner loop. The Retromat book and the free Retromat Quick Ref flag activities as short, medium or long.

A major factor that determines how much time you need is team size. Most activities take more time the more people are there. I would not attempt a 60 minute retro with a team of 15. With a team of 6 though, 60 minutes are probably fine. (Some teams are more eager to discuss than others, though…)

Okay, let’s make the cut here and see you next week for more things to consider during planning.

Take a minute:
How are you currently picking activities? How do the resulting retros work?

Back in a bit, 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

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5. The Ground Rules for Retrospectives

[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.

Prime Directive

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:

Prime Directive for Retrospectives: 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.

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

Vegas Rule

“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

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4. My Inner Loop, or: Phases are not always linear

[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

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2. Lean Coffee, my beloved

[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:

Timeboxed Lean Coffee

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.

Here’s how it works:

1) Collect Topics

  • Everyone needs sticky notes and a pen
  • You each write down the topics you would like to talk about – one topic per sticky note
  • Going around the group, everybody puts their stickies up on a board and reads out their topic(s). Cluster stickies that are about the same topic. If there is disagreement about whether something is the same topic, don’t enter a discussion just leave them as separate votable topics. When in doubt, don’t cluster.

2) Prioritize

  • Time to dot vote: People vote on the issues they would like to discuss by marking their 3 favorite topics
  • Order the stickies by number of votes

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:

  • Set a timer for 10 minutes. When the timer beeps, everyone gives a quick thumbs up or down. Majority of thumbs up: The topic gets another 5 minutes. Majority of thumbs down: Start the next topic with 10 minutes on the clock.
  • If applicable: Before you change the topic, write down any decision, todos, and the like
  • Stop when the total meeting time is up

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:

  • Dot vote – a fast way to choose between many options
  • Roman vote/Gladiator vote – a quick way to decide Yes or No for a specific choice

They are absolute facilitation basics that every team should know for less aimless talking and faster decisions.

Side Note on Turn Taking

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:

  • Are your team members already taking turns or are some voices crowded out?
  • Can you think of a meeting you regularly attend that would benefit from Lean Coffee? Or Dot Voting?
  • How can you introduce what’s missing?

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

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Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives

Hello there,

welcome to my course about retrospectives, friend! There will be a new topic every Tuesday for the next 20 weeks:

  1. What is a retrospective?
  2. Lean Coffee, my beloved
  3. Best Retrospective for Beginners
  4. My Inner Loop, OR: Phases are not always linear
  5. The Ground Rules for Retrospectives
  6. Picking activities – How I plan a retrospective
  7. Other factors that influence how I plan a retrospective
  8. Co-located Retros – Preparing the room and materials
  9. Remote Retros – Adapting activities
  10. During the retrospective – The actual facilitation
  11. Why do we do retrospectives?
  12. How to craft good Action Items
  13. Following up on follow through – New Phase 2
  14. Why vary activities?
  15. What’s up with the team right now? – Tuckman (and Glasl)
  16. What kind of questions do you ask?
  17. Smoother Retrospectives with a Kick-Off
  18. Other Resources
  19. Closing Thoughts

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

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Facilitation is a Team Sport – New Book

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 

  • Finger Queue to improve turn taking and flow
  • Hand Signals to visually add information and cut down on repetitions and 
  • Lean Coffee to prioritise topics

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

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Welcome to Multipartiality!

For the longest time I thought it was my job as a facilitator to be neutral and impartial. I wasn’t sure I was “doing it right”, when I strengthened one party in a conflict by paraphrasing and helping them be understood, when they were at the disadvantage and I wanted the parties to have equal footing to work things out.

It wasn’t until the workshop with solution-focused coaches Veronika Jungwirth and Ralph Miarka that I learned a new word: Multipartiality (“Allparteilichkeit“).

It means to be able to understand and empathize with each party as needed, to help them phrase and explain their needs.

You expect neutrality from a judge. But mediators and (depending on the situation) facilitators will be more effective with a mindset of multipartiality.

Nowadays, I do not in facilitate meetings in which I know I won’t be able to be multipartial.

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

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Enjoy the Silence

Many people are uncomfortable with silence. As a facilitator, it is important to become friends with silence and not feel compelled to fill awkward pauses.

I’ve learned that lesson a while back: Holding the silence used to be hard for me. I like to talk. I’m a chatty person. Shutting up is difficult for me. Letting silence be. Enduring it. It helped me to count from 10 to 20 in my head and to start over when I had reached 20.

If you look at people with attention and fully expecting them to continue talking, they will talk again. Even if, technically they have already said something about the issue. And that is when the magic happens!

Very interesting things happen when you don’t fill an awkward silence with chatter. You’ll hear things that others don’t readily come forward with. These are often newer or more controversial thoughts – Not surface level, not something they will readily share with anyone. Finding out about these deeper or more cautious thoughts is super valuable. You can work on concerns and keep issues from festering.

It’s magical. Enjoy the silence! Make it work for you 🙂

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