CultureRevolutionizing My Retrospectives: How I Transformed My Process and Results

It is possible you have attended or facilitated a retrospective, or you may be unused to the concept. Let me give a brief overview of what a retrospective is: According to the SCRUM Guide, the retrospective ritual is:

A time-boxed event to enhance quality and effectiveness by reviewing how the sprint worked and defining actions for improved performance for the next sprint.

You can find a lot of definitions about what the retrospective ritual is and what it isn't; I have just shared the most extended, but you can also check (Forbes article or Retrium) I mostly agree with them, but I think they miss two key points:

1. It’s a safe space, no matter the activities you do during the rituals, if your team does not feel that this meeting is a safe place to talk openly the outcome will not be real.
2. It’s an excellent opportunity to do some team building: increase engagement, motivation, and cooperation.

So my description of the retrospective will look like this:

It’s a time-boxed ritual that gives the team a safe place to inspect how the last period was, define actions to improve for the next period (on quality and effectiveness) & do some team building

Quite a few things for a meeting that lasts between one and three hours, no? Yes, following the Scrum Guide for a 4-week sprint, this ritual should last 3 hours, but I've never done one of them for so long; maybe in some situations, it can be 🤷🏻‍♀️

To give you some examples, the longest retrospective I've facilitated lasted 2 hours and it was because we were growing a team that we wanted to split into two, so we were a lot of people for a Scrum squad; as an example here at Factorial, we are a team of 9 and the monthly retrospective normally takes us 90 minutes.

Now that you know what a retrospective is and that improvement actions and team building are the outcomes, let's discuss the lessons learned and the changes I've made to how I run retrospectives during the past years.

Beginning of the journey

I began attending and leading retrospectives in 2015. Since then, there have been some big milestones that have affected my learning and evolution. I'll focus on those.

To put yourself in the situation, the first retrospective I attended was all the squad in a meeting with a whiteboard divided in two, with an "OK" title on one side and a "KO" one on the other. We just put post-its on each side, explain them, vote for them, and then debate the 3 or 4 most voted to generate actions to improve on each of the topics… a bit of a spoiler here: this keeps being the essence of a retro, but…

Do you think you are getting all the attention of the participants if they are doing the same retro after retro? Will it allow us to talk about the elephant in the room?

Let me answer for you… No.

Use different dynamics, avoid patterns and monotony

Here is the first learning and change I made in the retrospectives:

Avoid repeating the same dynamic if you want participants to be present.

Why? You already have a pattern on the cadence, if you add monotony to that you will end up having a team attending a meeting with the studied topics that are going to be risen and with motivation/expectations 0.

How can you avoid it? This is the easiest part.

There are many pages with dynamics that you can use. The three I usually use the most are these:

• TastyCupcakes (even since they have changed the UI the search is almost impossible),
• Retromat (this one also has a randomizer that picks for you one activity per retro step)
• Fun Retrospectives (this one has a really nice searcher and all the activities are categorized on the menu).

You can find more classical activities like: “3/4 L’s”, “Sailboat”, “Well, not so well, new Ideas”, etc.; to really different ones that can be or not focused on what you want to achieve, for example: if you know that there is a problem that is not being raised by the team the “tower defense” retrospective is really good, as it first focuses on creating the “enemies” of the last period; and after that creating “towers” to defend from them (get the actions).

Make sure to take the temperature of the room

Now you use really cool dynamics and you know you can choose them depending on the outcome you want. Will that work always?

Sorry, but no. There is a big thing to take into account and it is that we are humans, and our moods will affect us, so to understand how the retrospective will be evolving you need to understand how they have felt during the last period, how they feel about the meeting and/or how they feel at the moment as all this will affect their answers and also how they react to others' answers.

To check this you can just use a mood meter dynamic, there are plenty of them, and it should not take longer than five minutes. It can be as simple as choosing an emoticon, and that will give you enough information.

Can you call it a day?

We have just talked about the start of the session, and how knowing our peers' feelings can affect the rest of the retro. However, what about the end? We decide the actions and leave.

Couldn't that be improved? Yes.

Should it be something really big? No.

Think that at that moment you would already have spent at least one hour focusing on improvements, so I normally try to keep it:

• Quick: no more than 5 minutes.
• Simple: an example the feedback door dynamic
• And if possible funny (I love the “if this retro was a meme…” and iteration over “Know your meme”)

From on-site to remote

Is it already COVID year? No, I had to make the change to remote retrospective before COVID arrived, as a few months before I had a team that was hybrid, from time to time we met, but not every 2 weeks… so I had to adapt again, it looked like the end for Lego retros 🥲 or any kind of dynamic that required physical objects… and partially it was, but with a bit of creativity, you can adapt a lot of them…

You can do the Lego retrospective by changing the Legos for drawing (and there are plenty of online drawing tools).

One retrospective I was especially happy to adapt is the story cubes retrospective. I’ve some of the original Rory’s dice from my kid so I’ve run this one with different teams and they have always liked it… there are different websites where you can roll the dice online.

So the big deal here is the tool to use. The ones I like the most are Miro and Figjam. They already have templates you can use (Miro more than Figjam) and have a lot of extra tools that are useful: timers, stamps, voting systems, etc. But to speak (write) the truth you just need one online tool that lets you:

• Work together (it must be a collaborative tool).
• Add post-its.
• Add images.

Everything is planned.

The next change is really simple, I just add an agenda, and the second section of the retro (the first is the retrospective prime directive) just shows how we are going to divide the retrospective time, it lets the team know what are they going to do during the meeting, but for me as a facilitator has it has more benefits as it helps a lot with the planning, to summarize them:

• Before the meeting, I could see if all the dynamics I wanted to do fit in the meeting time or if I had to change something.
• During the retrospective, it gave me visibility of the minutes I needed to set for the timer

You have to know your peers to have a safe place

And finally, we have arrived at COVID time. We have passed to spend a lot of time together seeing our faces only through a screen. Remote work has a lot of positive things (I love it and I’ll not switch back to on-site if I can choose) but it has affected team spirit and bonds. That's why I added an ice-breaker to the retrospective meeting.

I pick a dynamic for the ice-breaker depending on various factors, but the most significant is the bond between the team, whether anyone recently joined, if it is a new team, etc.

Also if it’s a team that has been working together for a long time and you already have an established bond between the members I usually use this ice-breaker to make the bond stronger while trying to get them ready for the meeting.

You have an e-mail

This is the last and most recent change. The last retrospectives have been in teams that are big enough to make the retrospective longer than 90 minutes, but I do not want to get rid of any of the parts of the retrospective, so after thinking about it, the part where you expend most time is gathering the data, and this can partly be made asynchronous (it could be completely asynchronous I know, but I do not want to do it) so I decided to send an email one or 2 days before to the team.

In the email, I just shared with them:

• The retro theme
• The agenda
• And the points/questions/topics for the “gather the data” section

And ask them to think about the points before the meeting. This way I do not have to increase the time needed for the "gather the data" section, avoiding increasing the duration of the meeting.

To hit the nail on the head

As you can see there have been many significant changes. Does it mean that it will always work like that or that I never change these blocks? No, because every rule has an exception, and I have found two exceptions for now.

In the first case, if I already knew the team's mood, probably because they had had a difficult time recently. In this case, I made the following changes:

• Instead of a mood-meter activity, I run a dynamic that makes them forget their previous work for a few minutes so their focus is on the meeting. Sometimes I even merge the icebreaker into this dynamic so I have more time.
• Whenever I think there is an elephant in the room, I pick the "gather the data" dynamic more carefully than usual to ensure the meeting ends with action steps.

The second case is when the retrospective is about a side project done by members of different teams; in this case, I remove both the "mood-meter" and "icebreaker" sections and run one dynamic to make sure their focus is on the retrospective.

Wrap-up

To summarize everything we have said until now, the retrospectives I run are compound of these nine sections:

1. Prime directive → The text with the prime directive of the retrospectives.
2. Agenda → The list of activities with the time-boxed for each one in minutes.
3. Mood-meter or set the stage → Dynamic.
4. Ice-breaker → Dynamic
5. Review last retrospective actions → We go through the list of actions we have set on the previous retrospective checking if it is done or not. If it's not done, we decide whether to keep it.
6. Gathering the data → Dynamic.
7. Generating insights → Dynamic.
8. Generate actions → Dynamic.
9. Closing → Dynamic.

Depending on the activities you are using points 5, 6 & 7 maybe become just one or 2 of them.

And now that you have this list in mind, let me share with you the steps I’m following in order to facilitate each retrospective depending on the moment

Before the meeting:

1. Choose the dynamics I think will let me take the most of that meeting.
2. Create or set up the material I will use for the session.
3. Send the email to the team.

During the meeting:

• Explain each step when you are going through them
• Make sure that the time is not exceeded, that everybody is participating & that the prime directive is respected

After the meeting:

1. Create the minutes of the meeting
2. Don’t forget the actions you have assigned

I hope that you have enjoyed the reading and that you have found at least one new tip that is useful for you.