The War on Inaction: 6 Steps to an Effective Retrospective
By: Joanna Louise Durant
Tags: How To, Agile, Retrospectives, Change Management, Tips

The War on Inaction: 6 Steps to an Effective Retrospective

Retrospectives can be the catalyst for change as long as you’re doing them right. Here’s how.

Photo by Will H McMahan on Unsplash

One of the most valuable skills I’ve learnt in my career so far is how to run retrospectives that yield action and results.

I love a good retrospective. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a team retrospective session, personal retrospective or even just a retrospective of a recurring meeting. It’s the perfect chance to reflect and improve (with the emphasis here really being on improve).

For those of you who are all too familiar with retrospectives, you might leave with one of these feelings:

They’re a waste of time because no one listens to your input and nothing ever changes anyway *eyeroll* You’ve aired your problems but then it dawns on you that there were no tangible actions put in place before you all left the meeting *facepalm* Really excited for the upcoming weeks while you test new ways of working and see which things improve *happy dance*

If you’re already at #3 maybe you don’t need to continue reading (but you might as well because you’ve already started) — those of you stuck on 1 or 2: read on!

And if you’ve never run or taken part in a retrospective before in your life, read to the end and you’ll be ready to schedule one right away.

The key to a successful retrospective is to leave with a set of tangible actions that you (and your team) can do to test your hypothesis for improvement.

So here I’m going to share with you my favourite 45 minute retrospective formula which always gets results.

Getting ready for the retrospective:

If you’re running it in person: Make sure you’re in a room with whiteboards, board markers and post-its. Take some snacks to keep everyone’s energy up.

If you’re running it online: I’ve put some online tips in the sections below, but I highly recommend using funretro or miro to conduct your online retrospective collaboratively.

Step 1: Group reflection (3 min)

If this is a sprint / project retrospective, start by reminding yourselves of what you’ve done in the sprint — this should only take around 2–3 minutes. Ask everyone to call out the main achievements they can think of and note them up on the board.

If it’s a retrospective for a meeting or general group way of working, start by refreshing everyone’s memory by asking them to call out the usual way you work together and note these points up on the board.

Online tip: Share your screen and use notepad or something simple to note these points down — they’re only important for getting the group going.

Step 2: The Positives (10 min)

(a.k.a the good, the wind in our sail, what pushes us forward)

The positive items on a retrospective board

Tell everyone to think about the things they feel are working well. What is driving the group forward? What things do they want to keep doing?

Give everyone 5 minutes to write these things down on post-its (or straight up on the board if they prefer). After the 5 minutes are up, ask each person to stick their post-its up and say a quick something about each note. Don’t allow for discussion here, let everyone have their opinion heard.

Online tip: Everyone will probably already be able to see what is written but it is still good to do a round robin and ask everyone to share at least a couple of their points.

Step 3: The Negatives (10 min)

(a.k.a. the bad, the anchor, what holds us back)

Positive and negative items on a retrospective board

Now give everyone roughly 8 minutes to write down the things they feel are not working so well. What went wrong this sprint? What do we keep doing that’s making life hard? What extraneous circumstances are stopping us from performing to our best?

This time, ask everyone to stick up their notes at the same time without sharing them out loud — we don’t want to get ourselves into a pit of despair, we want to retain the positive mindset for the next step.

Online tip: As before, everyone will probably be able to see the notes as they’re being written, but that’s OK — just move to the next step without sharing out loud.

Step 4: Group, vote and prioritise (7 min)

Grouped and prioritised items on a retrospective board

Group: Start by encouraging everyone to group the negative post-its into categories / duplicates. People will have written the same type of thing as each other so before voting it’s important to group these points together. This should only take a couple of minutes and is a good chance for everyone to read the post-its.

Vote: Now give everyone a certain number of votes — I usually give around 3 or 4 — this can be in the form of sticky dots, making a dot with a pen, gold stars or whatever you can think of! Just ask everyone to vote on the items they think are the most important to solve going forward. They can put multiple votes on one post-it and of course vote on their own post-its.

Prioritise: After all the votes have been cast, arrange the post-its by order of highest to lowest votes.

Online tip: if you’re using funretro you can drag and drop items to merge them, set the amount of votes you want and order the items by number of votes.

Step 5: Create actions for improvement (15 mins)

Now you have a prioritised list of problems you want to solve. I suggest taking the top 3 items and rewording these as “how might we” questions to turn your challenges into opportunities for improvement. For example, instead of “people are always late to the meeting” reword that to “how might we schedule the meeting so people can always be on time?”.

Now create 1 to 3 tangible actions to solve each “how might we” question.

Tips for creating tangible actions:

You should be able to perform the action within a short time frame — I suggest 2 weeks — this allows you to test the solution quickly and see whether you’re going in the right direction. So instead of saying “document our way of working” say “write a first draft of our way of working document” Put concrete values in actions — this will help you know when you have completed the action and gives you a real target to work towards. Instead of saying “call more customers this week” say “call 3 more customers this week” Assign the actions to a person in the group — make sure someone is responsible for following up on the action, otherwise everyone will leave the room and think it’s someone else’s responsibility to fix the problems.

Step 6: Rate the retro

Ask everyone to rate the session by holding up a number of fingers showing their rating out of 5 before you end. If anyone gives a 3 or less, it might be a good idea to ask them what they didn’t like. Hopefully you get 4+ and everyone will be looking forward to the next one!

Online tip: This is a little difficult to do online but you can use a tool such as mentimeter to rate the session.

After the retrospective:

Make the actions unforgettable

Put the actions somewhere obvious! If you’ve got them on post-its, stick them in the team area or by the coffee machine. Send the actions in an email. Write them in Jira. Send each person off with their post it of actions. Schedule a follow-up session if needed. Whatever you do, just don’t forget about them.