The Retrospective: A known recipe for improvement — with my own spice

Have you ever been at this retrospective:

The team gets together, write up some post-its on what was good/bad in the last Sprint. Vote on which ones of the bad ones to do something about. Agree that those are the things we will fix, and then at the next Retrospective no one can remember, what we actually agreed to do something about. Then we start over and do the exact same again. This creates Retrospectives that are just long meetings. Where people are frustrated and do whatever they can to avoid participating.

I have been to my share of such Retrospectives. Which has led me to take up the fight every time I encounter a Retrospective like that.

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen created a “recipe” with a set of stages recommend to go through during a Retrospective. I have used it a lot over the years, and still use it every time I run a Retrospective or have a dialog with anyone about Retrospectives.

As all chefs who cook something multiple times I have come to add my own ingredients. This is my take on the recipe, what I think is important to remember, and what to focus on.

I will not go over the generals of each stage, for that I will refer you to Derby and Larsen’s work (Agile retrospectives — Making Good Teams Great). So if you have no prior knowledge of Retrospectives, I would recommend you look that up first.