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Leading a Retrospective

The retrospective lead helps facilitate the retrospective keeping it on track and on time. They also look out for any issues that might arise, redirecting the discussion as necessary or taking other moderation actions.

The most important job of the lead is to ensure that the retrospective remains a blameless process. A retrospective must focus on finding solutions to issues that improve processes, and the language used by participants must adhere to the prime directive of retrospectives:

The Prime Directive of Retrospectives

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."

The Lead "Jobs"​

The retrospective lead:

  1. Starts the retrospective and reminds participants of the process and rules
  2. Moves the retrospective along through each section. In particular, they:
    • Do their best to keep each section within its allotted time. This is currently 30m for "what went well", 30m for "what went less well" and 45-60m for "what will we do differently".
    • When people try to skip ahead with solutions, remind them to wait for the "what will we do differently" section.
  3. Defuse the situation if the "prime directive" is breached and accusatory language is used. Bring the discussion back to how we can change our processes to prevent issues from happening, and remind participants that mistakes, sometimes significant, are part of any ambitious effort.
    • If discussion gets heated, you can call for a short break. This might allow participants to step back and get back into a collaborative mindset.
  4. Call out inappropriate behavior if unable to bring the discussion back to order, and ask for it to stop.
    • If the disruption continues, call for a timeout and discuss further actions with other moderators.
tip

A productive retrospective is a shared goal. While the lead has the ultimate responsibility for the above, every participant is empowered to help!

Starting a Retrospective​

To start a retrospective, the lead will:

  1. Create a thread for the retrospective
  2. Welcome participants (@ those missing as needed) and officially start the retrospective
  3. Remind people about the 3 sections of the retrospective
  4. Remind people about the "prime directive"
  5. Remind people not to shared what was discussed in the retrospective widely, and to use their best judgement when sharing in private.
  6. Ask for confirmation that people understand and agree to these rules.
Welcome Template

This was used by Ms Boba in some retrospectives and is presented for inspiration.

Show retrospective welcome template

Welcome everyone! For some of you this is the first retrospective and others might need a refresher, so let me give you an overview of how it works

This retrospective will go through 3 sections:

  1. we're going to celebrate and discuss everything that went well during this sprint (~30m)
  2. we're going to discuss what we think went less well (~30m)
  3. we're going to brainstorm ideas to help us do more of the things in 1, and avoid the issues in 2 (~45-60m)

The most important bit to keep in mind is that in nothing discussed should be taken (or intended) as blaming people for things that happened or didn't happen. We must recognize that "everyone of us did the best they could with the situation they were in at the time". Our goal is not to change people, but to make our practices stronger so that we can become more effective and resilient, even when issues inevitably happen.

Last bit: unless you have permission from the participant to share widely, what's discussed here should remain private. Discussing the retrospective with small circles of friends is fine (within limits), but try to use your best judgement and honor people's right to privacy.

Any questions?

After the retrospective: collecting action items​

After a retrospective ends, it's good practice to collect issues and action items in a document for future reference. This is not strictly the job of the retrospective lead, though sometimes the lead will be the one undertaking it.

This is the process used by Ms Boba to collect action items:

  1. Divide a document into the same 3 sections we go through during the retro (see examples)
  2. Go through the whole chat, and for each significant statement put it in the section that's more closely aligned
  3. Go through the section on what we didn't go well and look for big themes, like "PR process needs improvements" or (get more examples). Don't worry too much about if some feel too similar at this stage. Also, when a statement has been clearly captured in a theme, you can strike through the statement to help you find the ones that still need positioning.
  4. Look at the list of theme and make merges using your best judgement. You can continue reworking this list as you go through 5.
  5. Write down a small summary of each theme using the list of things that need improvements (remove the strikes on the list if added).
  6. Go through the potential improvements list and assign them to each section
  7. Write a summary of the suggestions for each session. Try to give them titles that allow people to skim quickly through the list.