Category: Retrospectives

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

Hi there,

last week’s post had a co-located perspective. But nowadays, a lot of meetings, retros included, are remote. I’ve mostly facilitated via videocall, ever since Covid hit. At my workplace, we switched to everyone working from home virtually overnight and all my retros were suddenly virtual. The good news is, most things translate well into online retros.

For a long time, I had assumed that almost every activity could be adapted to work remotely and ever since creating the Retromat Miroboard Mega Template, I’m sure: Out of 146 activities, only 16 do not easily translate into a remote context.

Apart from adapting the activities, there are other things that are notably different in a remote setting:

• Easier to prep for, harder to run
  I find it easier to prepare for remote retros: No need to book a room, make sure that the markers work, clean boards or other physical prep work. And ever since I built the Miro Templates, I’ve gotten really fast at prepping for a remote retro.
  During the retro, I find it harder remotely, mostly because of the tech hiccups that inevitably happen, like people suddenly dropping from the call.
• Harder to stay focused
  Maybe that’s just a me-problem but I find it much harder to stay focussed in a remote setting, especially when I am waiting for others to finish a silent round of writing. In a co-located retro, there is nothing else for me to do but be present. Remotely, everything else I could be doing is just one browser tab away.
  And concentration in general is harder to keep up when all you do is stare at a screen. I try to have a break roughly every 60 minutes (compared to every 80 minutes for a co-located setting).
• Body language and positioning
  These are missing in a digital context. 
• There is no implicit rotation
  If you are all in one physical space, sitting in a circle, participants can take turns in round-robin activities very easily. That’s much harder in digital settings and often leads to wasted time, while everyone is unsure who’s supposed to speak next. Some ways to solve this:
  • Have a virtual circle of the team members on a board
  • Use the list of participants in your video call tool, if it’s stable and the same for everyone
    (I’d love to use this but we use Google Meet which for each participant omits their own name in the list. Makes it very easy to be unsure about when it’s your own turn)
  • Ask participants to pick the next person at the end of their own turn
    (I mainly use this one, but honestly, with mixed results. People frequently forget to name the next person.)
  • Use the “raise hand” feature of your videocall tool
    (We use that feature all the time in free discussions but not when going around in circle, when I’d ideally want everyone to speak once.)
• Anonymity is harder to achieve
  If you want to run an activity with anonymous input, you need to put in more thought beforehand

It’s very likely that there are things missing here

If I can, I avoid hybrid settings. My retros are either co-located or everyone is on the call independently. In my experience, in hybrid there’s a good chance that the sound is crap and there’s always someone out of the video frame. Plus, the co-located people tend to forget about the remote people. That being said, tech has actually gotten better in recent years, with mics and cameras that can focus on the speaker and it’s not a total pain anymore. But bad audio is incredibly exhausting and if I don’t have to, I don’t want to potentially waste my participants’ mental resources.

Take a minute:
Which mode do you prefer, remote or in-person? How do you solve the round-robin turn-taking in remote settings?

Okay, that’s that then! On to the “during” part of retros next week 🙂

Cheers, Corinna

PS: If you use Miro, our Mega Template might be interesting for you.

PPS: I’ve only mentioned digital boards like Miro, Mural, Conceptboard etc. There’s always other ways to do it. I’ve used easyretro.io and heard of shared Google Docs, shared Powerpoint decks and so on. As long as you can all edit and are all referring to the same source, try out what works best for you out of the tools that are available.

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 🙂

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

Welcome back!

Up until Covid, all my retrospectives were co-located. It’s the context in which I learned to facilitate and what informed most of Retromat. Today we will go over the logistics for co-located retros and next week we’ll look at how remote retrospectives differ.

Holding space – literally

One way to describe good facilitation is “holding space”. It’s meant figuratively but if the meeting is co-located then you also need to prepare the real, physical space.

Book a suitable room in advance. Get there early to set everything up for the retro. If you’re new to facilitation, make that at least an hour. This time will get lower as you get familiar with everything. But you’ll always want to have some time for last minute fixes and fetching missing stuff.

Team Room vs Different Room I’ve just now realized that I’m so used to meeting rooms for retrospectives that I didn’t even consider using the team’s room (if they have a shared space). I prefer a separate room to make it easier for the team to get into the retro headspace (“we’re doing something different now”) and so that we won’t be disturbed. That being said, for some activities it is beneficial to stay in the space the team work in, such as “Room Service” or when you focus flow on boards.

If the room is booked immediately before your slot, prepare your equipment outside of the room.

I always use white boards, so I prep:

• Board Markers for writing on boards and felt tip pens (I like Edding 1200 and 1300) to write the notes. I actually draw a line with each pen and sort out the ones that don’t paint well anymore.
• Sticky notes in different sizes
  The expensive ones from 3m, cheap ones fall off the board. Actually, my new workplace provides reusable magnetic sticky notes from Bambook and these work pretty well. They definitely don’t fall off the board 🙂
• Since I’ve prepped my activities in advance, I already know what I will draw on the boards, as soon as I can enter the room. Well, if the boards are clean, which they rarely are. So cleaning the boards, then drawing.
  I put effort into a lot of things, but physical boards are not one of them, sorry. Mine are very basic, that’s why I don’t need much time. That being said, teams usually do appreciate extra art work. (I observed that with other more diligent and/or artistic facilitators)

If you use flip charts, your list will look slightly different. Flip chart markers (I’m with the Neuland truthers), maybe sticky notes and felt tip pens, and you probably draw your charts beforehand, ready to hang up. Oh, something to put paper up with: Magnets, tape, needles, … Depending on what background you’re working with.

(Btw, here are my secret tips for more polished flip charts and sketchnotes.)

If you’re giving me a choice between co-located and remote retros (and it doesn’t depend on anything else like travel time, costs, health risks etc.) I’ll always choose co-located, because it gives me additional tools to use:

Body language

Someone’s body language is a valuable (even if sometimes misleading) source of information, not just for me, for everyone in the room! All of this is lost in a video call, and facial expressions are also harder to catch. All the shrugs, frowns, half-snorts, shuffling and turning away that clue you in to ask for clarification. It’s easier to pick up weird vibes and check in, in person.

Position in the space

Where and how someone sits influences how much they will take part. I use this to the group’s advantage. If somebody barely participates I will often try to physically bring them into the fold more: Are they sitting slightly outside the circle or apart from the group? I’ll invite them in.

Depending on the situation, I might talk to them after the retro in preparation of the next one, instead of putting someone on the spot during the retro.

Oh, I haven’t talked about the room setup yet!

For bigger teams (7 people or more) I set up the chairs in a flat u-shape around the whiteboards, with me sitting at one end of the u, so that I can easily get to the boards.

In small teams I tend to just have everyone sit around a table. That means that some people have to turn to see the whiteboard. I usually position the board at an angle at one of the corners, with me sitting next to it on one of the long sides, not the head of the table.

My goal with either setup is to increase the likelihood that team members will talk to each other, rather than with me. When I’m not actively explaining an activity I try to blend into the background.

Take a minute:

What room setups have you seen in workshops and meetings? How have they influenced the flow of the event? What would you like to try in your next retro?

Next week we’re gonna cover remote retrospectives. See you then *waves*

Corinna

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 🙂

[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: 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 🙂

[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:

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: 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 🙂

[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 its course 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: 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 🙂

[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: 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 🙂