How do you retrospective? — Your guide to planning, facilitating and following up on a retrospective?
When you are doing agile in any sense, the most important ceremonies you should do are the stand up and the retrospective. In this article I would like to focus on the retrospective. What I have seen is that teams struggle a lot with the retrospective because of its format, usefulness and overall motivation to do one. One general phrase I have heard multiple times is “Yeah let’s move the retrospective”. This is very critical as the retrospective is THE ceremony to change anything in the process of how you work together.
It is meant to be the place to optimise your ways of working and adapt in an iterative fashion to how you work together which impacts your business, your team and your overall situation.
If you think about it this is almost the definition of working agile (part of the agile manifesto about “individuals and interactions” and “responding to change”). On top of that it is an actual principle of the 12 agile manifesto principles.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.
— https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
So this is a guide on how to get more out of your retrospective and make it more useful and more fun at the same time.
This is an example agenda I use for retrospectives that has proven to work in most situations with lots of different teams and settings while doing consulting for 3 years:
- Ice breaker (5–10 minutes)
- Read the prime directive (1 minute)
- Safety check (1 minute)
- Happiness Check (1 minute)
- Previous action items (5–10 minutes)
- Data gathering (5 minutes)
- Dot voting (1 minute)
- In depth discussions (30–45 minutes)
- Assign owners to action items (5 minutes)
The total time slot for the retro should be 1–1.5 hours Before we talk about the agenda in depth, let’s talk about time keeping and the numbers in the parenthesis in the agenda.
Time keeping
This is one of the two major things you have to do as the facilitator.
What I always like to do is to set time boundaries for everything. This sounds first a bit scary or like putting people under pressure but this actually comes with a disclaimer. In retros I frame it like this: „Let’s talk about x for x minutes. Don’t worry, if we see we need more time we are going to extend it.“
This means:
- Set fixed time slots
- Let everyone know the time they have
- Inform people of the state of time (for example use a timer that everybody can see, let people know about the last remaining 30 and 10 seconds)
- If the time is not enough, extend by 1 minute (extend for max 3 times, anything that goes beyond that should own its own session)
Ground rules
When you prepare materials or boards or anything you wanna use for the retro, make sure everything stays anonymous and is accessible. It should be the participants choice if they want to identify as the owner of something or not. This has gotten easier with remote retros lately as things like handwriting can no longer be used to identify owners.
For example when you use any collaborative board tool make sure everybody can use it and nobody has to login or something. Check for browser compatibility if people us lots of different browser in the team, make sure your link to your tool works (try it out in incognito mode of your browser) or do a dry run with a colleague.
Apart from that the usual suspects for conversations apply
- Be respectful with each other
- Do not become personal
- Let each other finish and do not interrupt
A retro should be a safe space to say and talk about anything related to the process of how you work together. Which leads us to the first few points on the agenda.
Ice breaker
This is especially useful if people need some time to warm up. It was often the case when for example there are lots of bottled up feelings or stress in the team lately or some kind of negative connotation to retros.
The ice breaker should be fun and easy for everybody at the same time so people get into a good mood for everything that follows. Sometimes making things awkward can also be fun. Please be mindful of your audience.
Here is a bad ice breaker example you should stay clear of:
„Other people come up with an animal to describe you and share the explanation“
Anything where other people are going to describe one persons character is a thing that is just waiting to explode. Do not do this in any form. If you want to do something like this, let the people speak for themselves. For example turn it into „Describe yourself as an animal and share why you chose that animal“.
Try to make the ice breaker physical. It can be a good idea to get not only the mind but also the body going to get good energy in the room. Especially if you are doing a retro after lunch.
My go to ice breaker is: „I will message somebody with an animal and they have to make a sound that describes the animal. Everybody else has to guess which animal it is. The person who guesses right can think of the next animal and chooses the next person to do it.“
This is often just the right combination of fun and awkwardness which translates back to fun. Don’t stop until everybody made an animal sound.
Read the 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.
Put the prime directive somewhere where everybody can see and read it. Ask for someone to read it out loud so it becomes more emphasize. If nobody wants to do it, do it yourself and make sure to not go over it too fast.
This is the central mantra to invoke when doing a retro also as a facilitator. Make sure everything stays respectful and nobodies feelings get hurt. Try to not let people blame each other. If you see things turn bad, steer the conversation away from personal topics and put focus on the actual objective problems. If this is not helping remind the people of the prime directive and let the person playing the blame game read it out again.
Safety check
Remember when I said everything should be anonymous? This is the first crucial point in the agenda which makes use of this.
The safety check is there to see if your team is even in a position to have a meaningful and useful retro. To determine everybody's safety, let them anonymously vote on a scale from one to five of how safe they feel.
- I'm not going to talk at all, I don't feel safe.
- I'm not going to say much; I'll let others bring up issues.
- I'll talk about some things, but others will be hard to say.
- I'll talk about almost anything; a few things might be hard.
- No problem, I'll talk about anything.
If you do this in person, let them fold the paper where they write it down on and collect the pieces of paper from each. You could collect them in your hand or a bin, shake it around to mix them up and then take one out at a time and read out the number and keep count of them. Do not let anyone see the opened up pieces of paper.
You should stop the retro at this point, if there is at least one person not feeling safe, which means you have at least one vote with a two or one. If there are lots of 3 (majority) talk about if you want to stop the retro or talk about safety and ways you could do to improve it.
You stopped the retro, now what? Get a mediator (somebody outside the team) to collect anonymously from people the reason why they do not feel safe (e.g. google form or something) and what could improve it. Let the team members know that if they want to they can approach the mediator without anyone knowing about it (mediator will keep everything secret). The mediator then has to collect the data, get some insights out of it and present it back to the group. The group can then think about action items to take to tackle these issues.
If your safety check lets you continue the retro, do a quick happiness check to see how the teams happiness is (check out the example above).
Do not forget to keep the results of the safety check and the happiness check around so you can track over time how your team is doing on that front and try out ways to improve your teams psychological safety and team happiness.
Previous action items
This is a thing that I have seen most teams actually forget to do. After you have had your previous retro and decided on some action items, make sure to take the time now to quickly check if you have fulfilled the previous retros action items. Quickly go over all of them and ask yourself, if you made it happen or not. If you realised you did not make that action item happen, ask whether it is still relevant and if you can quickly discuss it. If you decide to discuss it and it takes more than a minute to discuss it, stop the conversation and move the discussion to the end of the retro together with the other new action items that should come out of this retro.
Data gathering
This is where you can become creative and think of fun ways to basically find out what went not so well and what went well over a given amount of time and where you need improvements to optimise your ways of workings. There are lots of resources online with many formats, for example: https://easyretro.io/retrospective-ideas/
Make sure there is enough time for everybody to write down and come up with ideas and try to let people think on their own first.
After the time is up or everybody is done with their ideas, collect all of the stickies and go through them. Just read them out for the group and make sure everybody understands what they are about. This can be tricky as it could lead into the actual discussion around it. If this happens make sure to shut it down and let people know there is enough time to talk about it in detail or let them know if they want to talk about it, they should dot vote on it next. Try to make sure that you really just clarify what the sticky was about if that is not understood.
Dot voting
After you have collected and went through all the stickies, cluster them into themes. Try to get the help of the group to cluster them and do not forget to put a label on the cluster. After you have your clusters, let everybody know they can have 3 dots per person they can distribute around all of the clusters. After they have done so you will have a prioritised list of topics you should talk about. The number of dots is dependent on how many people and how much time you have. I have found 3 to be a good number to talk about the most important topics first in almost any group size. Try to mess with this number and see how it works best for you.
In depth discussions
After you have your prioritised themes to talk about it is time to actually address them. Take for each theme 2 minutes as your first time window to talk about it. Again, prolong if needed and let the others know about the time and the possible prolonging (max 3 times). Start with the first one and if nobody is initiating at first, read it out again and try to initiate the conversation by yourself. Trying to elaborate on how you interpret it might be a good conversation starter. Do not end this with an explanation but try to keep it open and end the conversation starter with questions for the group. During this discussion things can get heated really fast. Stay alerted and try to steer the conversation to achieve some kind of action items and keep the conversation professional. If you see it is getting out of hand, interrupt them, bring them back to the ground rules and the prime directive. At times a tiny break can ease the minds and do wonders.
Your role as a facilitator will be most critical here. You will have to:
- steer the conversation to get to action items
- keep everything on time
- make sure ground rules and prime directive are not broken
- do more active listening than actively participating on the conversation
Once you have gotten action items, assure the action items you wrote down with the group to make sure you got it right and this is what they actually wanna do.
When a topic you are talking about has exceeded the dedicated time (after prolonging it), schedule a separate meeting about it because there is clearly enough conversation material to unpack here.
At the end make sure there is enough time to go over any previous action items from the previous retro you have set aside before (see Previous action items).
Assign owners to action items
The last 5 minutes you should use to assign owners to the action items you have so far. Owning an action item means that the owner should make sure the action item happens. This can mean not actually doing the action item but for example schedule a time for the people involved to make the action item happen and to drive it forward.
Conclusion
This was a rather larger introduction to retrospectives and trying to help you in facilitating and planning one. I hope most of these you are already doing in your retros, if not it would be lovely to hear how these things have changed your retros after you applied it. There is no golden ticket here telling you exactly how it works every single time. As most of the things, when working with people it really much depends on the people and the overall setup when you interact with each other. So feel free to experiment and try some things out and continuously improve on it. Would be lovely to hear your opinions and experiences in the comments!
Tools and suggestions
If you need a timer:
for remote retros:
Some retro ideas:
