Hi I'm Jeff Watts and welcome to another top 10 tips video. This one is about retrospectives and it follows up on my last load bulb talk which was talking about teams that are bored of retrospectives. I give you a few ideas for what to do there but here this is just my general top 10 tips for re-energizing any retrospective with any team. Retrospectives were probably a favorite part of mine of the agile process. It's an opportunity to solidify the things that we're doing well it's an opportunity to try new things and just generally get better at what we do which is an intrinsic motivator for most people that I've worked with but if you've been together as a team for any period of time it can quickly become stale. We certainly did. A retrospective was amazing for us the first time we saw one because it was so different to our previous sort of blame storming sessions at project post mortems and autopsies. We had a coach that came in and said let's figure out what went well over the last month or two. Let's figure out what we could do differently if we had our time again what we've learned that we can apply to the future and anything that we'd like to experiment with going forward and our minds were like blown by this revolutionary new approach that wasn't just about finding out who's screwed up so that we could hold them out to dry. And so we thought well if it worked once it'll work again we ended up doing it every month every few weeks and even though it is a good structure it quickly became a bit monotonous so we were then crying out for ways to just keep it a little bit fresh. And we've seen that same pattern in a lot of the teams that I've worked with since in different places so here's a few tips to help you just keep the energy in your retrospectives. They're not in a traditional 10 to 1 order because they're all differently valuable in different circumstances. The first tip is to get a good venue. Now almost doesn't matter where the new venue is because wherever you go there's different to where you are at the moment will give you a new type of energy, a new dynamic but in general somewhere with high ceilings increases creativity with lots of natural lights with big windows all around that helps with the creative process with a different type of energy in the room. We used to get our teams down to the pub regularly just to completely make it informal and change the dynamic. Tip two is get people moving just by standing up and moving around you've immediately got more oxygen flowing to your brain. You're not sitting and stagnating and almost falling asleep. Getting people engaged writing on the walls themselves rather than having one person around the computer or the whiteboard or the flip chart get people as engaged as possible. Quite closely associated with that tip three is bring food and drink. It's a little bit about making it informal. The idea of eating together, I'm not necessarily talking about alcohol here but just something that we can have. It's almost like a breakfast meeting or a lunch meeting or even an over dinner, having a slightly more informal conversation where we can just branch off and diverge and get into a different kind of energy and a different kind of space than we are if it's a formal meeting room, a man that ran a meeting table where we're all taking notes on our note pads. Tip four is state the purpose. That might sound strange because we all know we're here to have a retrospective but if we can be a little bit more specific then it can increase again the engagement and the energy because we know why we're there and it can be much more focused. So let's talk about the main goal of this retrospective is it to get better in a particular area, is it to identify an experiment and move forward people are investing a lot of their time in coming to these meetings, these workshops so letting them know what they can expect to gain from being there is really important. Tip five is experiment with metaphor. Now this is something that is a little bit risky because not everybody is a big fan of metaphor. I'll be honest when someone first came in and said could you describe this sprinters if it were a chocolate bar? My reaction was what the hell? Really a chocolate bar but it allows people to break their paradigm of their current state and their assumptions associated with that current state. It allows us to be a little bit freer in our associations because we can criticise a chocolate bar without criticising the sprint. We can explore where it might take us and open up new avenues that perhaps our trained thought process wouldn't allow us to do if we were thinking purely objectively and analytically. So good metaphors allow us to go to different places and allow people to get creative and allow people to see things from a completely different perspective. Tip six is let people play. Now I kind of mention this when I said get people up and around and move them but a game can be a really good thing to introduce in a retrospective. I'm not just talking about playing the playing sake. There's a lot of serious play out there. There's a lot of opportunities to introduce a simulation an actual agile game that has a big potential learning point. And tasty cupcakes is a great place to start to find some of those games but it's another good way of engaging people and allowing people to be a little bit freer in their expression and their explanation without being too worried about being direct at the actual sprint or perhaps their colleagues. Tip seven is encourage healthy conflict. Now that might sound a bit strange as well because we don't really want a fight in our retrospective but equally it shouldn't just be a case of us patting each other on the back. There's a good reason perhaps you having an appreciation session telling each other what we have helped each other and what we appreciate about each other but equally we should be critically evaluating our options. We should be challenging each other. We should be taking our opportunity to push each other to improve as individuals and as a team and we can only do that if we feel safe enough to have healthy conflict. And that has to be well facilitated. I've got one video on that and I'm going to do a couple more in the future but so keep an eye for those but right now I just think how could we increase our safety levels in our retrospectives to allow ourselves to be a little bit more courageous. Healthy conflict is a good thing as long as it allows us to debate, to analyse, to compare and contrast and then we can actually not take it to personally and leave the session still as our harmonious team. Tip 8 is a bit general here but keep things varied. Whatever it is bringing in a neutral facilitator, trying a new technique, anything just to keep it varied try something new each time. Don't get stuck in a rut. It's the easiest thing to do and it's the easiest way to turn people off these meetings which is so important to teams inspecting and adapting and realising the potential of themselves as a team. Tip 9 is gather data first before analysing it. Now this is quite a boring one but again it's really important. Very often teams will actually move into working at what the data means as soon as they capture it. So for example somebody will put a suggestion forward and we'll start working out whether that's true, what that means, whether it's connected to something else, somebody else has said what we can do about it whether it's worth solving is a right idea, a good idea, a bad idea but it's just one data point and actually the better teams will withhold judgement, withhold analysis until they've got a few data points out there. For two reasons. One, it allows you to be able to see the bigger picture and draw patterns from the data but secondly it stops people from being put off from putting their opinions forward. If I've got an opinion that I might want to share and I've seen somebody else put a data point out there and then it gets analysed and torn apart I'm less likely to put my data forward. So withhold that, get the data out there on the table then we can set some time aside to analyse it. And my final tip, tip 10 is make sure action is taken. All too often teams will take the opportunity in a retrospective to have a bit of a moan, a bit of a complain or perhaps even a bit of self-congratulation and it's just a talking shot but it's no use to you really, although it's a bit cathartic, it's no real use to you unless you actually take something out of it and make something happen as a result of it. So as a scrum master, as a coach, as a member of the team, make sure something is taken forward into the next sprint and put into action. If for no of the reason it gives us the, it reinforces the point that actually this was valuable time spent because something has changed as a result of it. If you're having trouble putting actions in play then have a look at my video on swatting your actions because that will help teams make these actions a little bit more sticky a little bit more realised. So that's my top 10 tips to re-emerge your retrospectives. Quick recap, get a good venue, get people moving, think about introducing food and drink, make sure you state the purpose, try matter for, see what happens, let people play, encourage healthy conflict, keep things varied, make sure you get the facts before you reflect on them and then take some action. Retrospectives are an absolutely crucial part of any empirical framework. Without that inspection and adaptation, getting better at things, we're just going to keep iterating in the same way. So do whatever it takes to keep people's interest levels and energy levels in the retrospective process high. I hope that was useful to you. If you've got any tips about how to keep your retrospectives fresh, please share them in the comments. The more information we give people out there, the better. Thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon.