Antoine Pezé
FR

How to run a retrospective

TL;DR

Summary

A 1h30 moment with a whole team to share feelings and take action accordingly.

Goal

Sustain continuous improvement in an organization.

Introduction

Retrospectives gained traction in the software world with Scrum. It’s a very important ritual in this Agile method: it lets the team debrief together on how a sprint went.

Originally, a retrospective lasts 1h30 for a 2-week sprint and takes place with the whole Scrum team after each review. So recurrence is the key to successful retrospectives.

Stakes

The stakes of a retrospective are to make a team master of its own evolution: everyone can speak up about how they perceive the organization and can position themselves to propose something different. We then talk about a self-learning team.

More broadly, the retrospective is a moment where sometimes “difficult” things are shared and where structuring decisions are usually made. They are wonderful moments where people listen to each other and can be true relief valves, even on minor conflicts.

These moments can be unsettling, since they let conflicts be addressed transparently. The facilitator should never try to soften conflicts but rather to surface them. And the repetition of these events builds significant group cohesion and trust: no matter the problem, we know we can solve it together, as long as we share it.

I’m continually surprised by the impact of retrospectives on a group. Try them and you’ll adopt them!

How it runs

1. Information gathering (45 min on average for 10 people)

There are several ways to collect what team members have lived through. Retrospectives usually happen every 2 weeks in development sprints. However, many teams outside of software also run retrospectives. In that case, they usually happen monthly.

I personally believe the retrospective facilitator should participate when they’re a stakeholder. They simply need to be careful to clearly signal when they’re stepping into the facilitator posture vs. the participant one.

Here are a few formats you can draw inspiration from to organize your retrospective.

The emotions retrospective (my favorite!)

Particularly interesting when:

  • you want to take the team’s pulse (“how is it going for them?”)
  • you want to put conflict situations on the table to find a solution
  • you want to celebrate something that went particularly well!

The emotions retrospective invites everyone to share their feelings during the past period (from 2 weeks to the past year) through a spectrum of 4 emotions: joy, fear, anger, sadness.

The facilitator gives the following instructions:

  • During the past month, what did you enjoy, what scared you, what made you angry or sad? (Adapt the language register to your context!)
  • I’ll give you 5 minutes to share what you felt. Lean toward sharing facts to illustrate your points! 1 sticky per idea.
  • The facilitator lets the group write and announces the time left: “2m30 left, 1 min left, 20 seconds left.”
  • Then they invite each person, one at a time, to come stick their note under the matching emotion. They’ll ask for detail or a concrete example if they feel the situation isn’t crystal clear.

The Keep Drop Start retrospective

Particularly interesting when:

  • you’re running a retrospective with a team for the first time
  • you have little time available

The “Keep Drop Start” retrospective invites people to share what to keep (= Keep, what went well and should be preserved) and what to drop (= Drop, what didn’t go well and needs to change). I’d suggest not displaying the “Start” category right away; it comes in step 3.

For facilitation, it’s basically the same as the emotions retrospective.

The factual retrospective

Particularly interesting when:

  • your team has already run several retrospectives
  • your last retrospective produced few results
  • you need ideas to relaunch momentum

The factual retrospective invites people to take a purely factual point of view. Two questions are proposed: “What worked” and “What needs to be improved”. It’s different from Keep Drop Start since it’s not problem-oriented but rather solution-oriented.

For facilitation, the point is still to leave time for everyone to present afterwards. Here, the facilitator must be especially vigilant to surface only factual elements and no feelings.

The debate retrospective

Particularly interesting when:

  • a problem persists and isn’t getting tackled
  • you sense that communication is difficult in the group
  • you want to focus on a specific topic

The debate retrospective invites an open discussion around a small number of topics. Ideally, you collect the team’s topics ahead of time via a Google Form for example. If that’s not possible, the facilitator can give 1 minute to each person to propose a topic that seems important to discuss, and the group quickly votes for the most important topic to address.

Once the topics are picked, the facilitator digs into the topic through 3 main phases:

  • First, they investigate to find out what has already happened on this topic. For example: “You voted to talk about code review. Can a volunteer describe what happened on this topic recently?”
  • Then, they try to understand the state of mind tied to this topic. For example: “I understand there have been some tensions on this topic. To start, James, how did you experience this situation?”
  • In a third step, they let people share their interpretations. The facilitator’s role is to reformulate what’s said to relay it to the people concerned. “Sarah, do you understand that James feels judged by the recent remarks you made?”
  • Finally, the facilitator reformulates all the problems they’ve identified.

2. Choosing topics to address (10 min)

Once several topics have been surfaced, it’s essential to prioritize the topics to address. The most effective way is to let the group vote for the topics that seem important to it. This phrasing has the advantage of leaving significant free will to the group. The point is then to go through all the topics that received votes (positive as well as negative).

I usually give 3 votes per person. If you seem short on time, give 1 or 2 votes per person max.

3. Action-taking phase (30 min)

This step is what makes the retrospective particularly valuable. Decisions made by the group itself turn the people concerned by a problem into actors. Whether to celebrate something positive or to fix a problem, the retrospective must end with action-taking.

Each new action is determined as follows:

  • It starts with an action verb in the infinitive. For example, instead of “US 34 documentation”, you must specify the action to do: “Add the description of US 34 to Confluence”.
  • It has a single owner whose name appears on the action. The owner doesn’t necessarily have to do everything, but it’s their job to move the action forward.
  • It must be time-bound. Avoid actions like “Always add the description in Confluence for our future US” and prefer something like “Add the description of the US for the current sprint”. This way, you can determine when an action is complete.

Before launching a new action-taking phase, I’d suggest reviewing the previous actions from the last retrospective. Doing this gives an update and lets the team see the accomplishments made.

A few rules and tips

  • As facilitator, it’s essential to enforce one rule: when someone starts a sentence, no one is allowed to interrupt them.
  • At the end of each participant’s turn, they can be asked “OK, now choose who will go next”. This works well and dynamizes the handoff.
  • From time to time, you can add a column for “thank yous”. Mention that this column is for people who want to thank someone for a particular action. I keep these mostly for review moments, like quarterly days.
  • Personal tip: I track my actions in a virtual document like Trello. I have 4 columns: “To do”, “In progress”, “To review before validation”, “Done”. This 3rd column helps the team become aware of all its accomplishments.

Who to invite?

First of all, I’d suggest inviting your whole team. But should you invite people a bit further from the team, like a manager or another stakeholder? Personally, I’d suggest including those people. A retrospective lets everyone speak up and creates a mutual awareness of each other’s problems. So it makes the actions that come next easier to understand. Including people other than the team in this process has always been beneficial in my experience. Team members didn’t talk less since it was the sharing moment they were used to.

Once you feel mature on the topic, I’d encourage you to host guests so they can observe how your retrospectives unfold; it’s often very formative for them!

Conclusion

The retrospective is a privileged moment to listen to each other and improve. It lets you share your point of view and rally the group to find solutions when problems come up.

A retrospective usually splits into 3 phases:

  • Information gathering (45 min)
  • Choosing topics to address (10 min)
  • Action-taking (30 min)

Over time, teams running regular retrospectives quickly grow in maturity. This lets them become self-learning teams, teams able to make decisions to improve their own efficiency, all autonomously.

When are you getting started?

Going further

Sources

Want to go further?

I offer individual coaching to dig deeper and apply these topics to your context.

Book a session