The retro starts, someone shares the board, and the same three columns fill with the same notes as last sprint. The deploy was slow. The tickets were vague. Nobody remembers what happened to last month’s action item. These retrospective ideas give an agile lead a different starting point: one word for the whole session, such as Failure, Trust or Fairness, and three passes on it that move from what happened to one thing the team will change. Each format works with a word on a sticky note. The free online table deals the words if you’d rather not pick.
Why retros stall at the complaint stage
Holding a retro doesn’t guarantee that a team reflects in it. Andriyani, Hoda and Amor interviewed 16 practitioners from four agile teams and watched their retrospectives. The teams discussed obstacles, feelings, previous action points, background reasons and next steps. The authors describe three levels of reflection: reporting and responding, relating and reasoning, and reconstructing. Their conclusion is that teams may not reach all three levels by running the meeting alone (Andriyani et al. 2017).
Complaining has a cost of its own. Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock videotaped 92 regular team meetings and coded what people said. Problem-solving and action planning went with higher meeting satisfaction. Criticizing and complaining went with worse outcomes, and those negative links were stronger than the positive ones (Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock 2012). The study shows links, not causes. Still, it fits what team leads describe on forums: a meeting spent listening to complaints, feedback that never turns into a change, and rounds of doodles that leave nothing behind. The ideas below keep the honest part of a complaint and give it somewhere to go.
1. Give the whole retro one word
A board with “went well” and “didn’t go well” asks people to sort the sprint in their heads before they say anything. A single word asks a smaller question. Write it at the top of the board and leave the columns empty. Failure, Trust and Fairness fit a sprint well, because a sprint can have something that broke, someone they relied on and some work that landed unevenly. Change the word each retro. A new word shakes loose a note the old columns didn’t have room for.
2. Run three passes on the word
The three levels from the Andriyani study make a simple running order. In the first pass, each person says what happened, with no reasons yet. In the second pass, the group picks one or two of those events and asks why. In the third pass, the group decides what it would do differently. Keeping the passes separate stops the meeting from jumping from a fact straight to a fix, and it stops the first pass from turning into a debate.
3. The Failure retro
Failure sounds like the hardest word, and it can bring out concrete answers: a script, a date, a test. Ask for things that failed, not people who failed. “The release script stopped halfway” is a good note. “Sam broke the release” is one to rephrase together, by describing what happened to the work.
Failure has Washing machine on its back. For a team, Failure can be read as an outage, a missed date or an estimate that was far off. The Washing machine side is a good way in for anyone who’d rather not name a failure in front of their manager. A washing machine runs the same cycle every time, so people may talk about the routines that keep repeating: the standup that runs long, the review that always waits until Friday.
4. The Trust retro
Trust turns a retro toward handoffs. Ask each person to name one place in the sprint where they relied on someone else’s work without checking, and one place where they checked twice. The second list is the useful one. A double check can mark a spot where the team doesn’t yet trust a process, a test or a handoff.
Trust has Window on its back. Window reads well for a team because it’s about what people can see. Someone might talk about a dashboard that shows the real state of a service. Someone else might name the part of the codebase that only one person can see into, and what happens when that person is on vacation.
5. The Fairness retro
Fairness brings up the work that never makes it onto the board. On-call shifts, interrupts, reviews, onboarding and the meeting notes nobody volunteered for all show up here. Ask each person to name one task from the sprint that landed on them by default. Then ask who else could take it next time.
Fairness has Sweater on its back. A sweater on the back of an office chair is something everyone borrows and nobody owns. A team may read it as the flaky test, the shared script or the old service that keeps everyone warm and that nobody wants to maintain.
6. Write before anyone speaks
The first spoken answer can set the tone for the rest. Give everyone a few quiet minutes to write their notes before anyone reads one out. For remote teams, post the word in the chat and ask people to type their answer, then send it at the same time. Nobody gets to adjust their answer to match the lead’s.
7. Make passing free
Some sprints are hard to talk about in front of a manager. The Thesis rules open with this line: “Before you start, agree together how passing works.” In a retro, anyone can pass on any word without a reason, and the lead says so before the first note. The rule card also says, “A short answer is a full answer. You can always ask for more.” For how to set that up with a team, see how to let people opt out of icebreakers.
8. Open with last retro’s action, close with one new one
Feedback with no visible result can give people a reason to stop giving it. Spend the first few minutes on the action item from the previous session: done, dropped or still open. Then leave the retro with one new action, an owner and a date. One finished change teaches the team that the notes go somewhere. A pile of open ones can teach the opposite.
Questions for a one-word retro
The questions below work with Failure, Trust and Fairness, and each one can be answered at any depth:
- What’s one thing that broke this sprint, and what was the first sign?
- What did we keep doing even though it wasn’t working?
- Which failure taught us something we’d use again?
- Whose work did you rely on without checking?
- Where did you check something twice, and why?
- What could the whole team see this sprint that it couldn’t see before?
- Which task landed on you by default?
- Who did work this sprint that nobody saw?
- What would make the next on-call week fairer?
- What’s one thing we’d try next sprint?
Running it as a card round
With the deck or the online table, a retro round follows the game’s steps. Draw a card, choose the idea or the thing, roll the die and look at the word from that side. The die has six plain words: MEMORIES · BODY · PEOPLE · VALUES · CHILDHOOD · FUTURE. The only instruction is “Look at the word from that side.” The others can ask one short question. The rule card gives three examples: What did that feel like? Who else was there? Has it always meant that to you?
To finish, borrow the game’s last round: “each player names one thing they discovered about someone at the table today.” In a retro, a short version works. Each person names one thing a teammate said that they hadn’t known before.
Before your next retro, write one word at the top of the board and the last action item under it. The three cards have their own pages: Failure, Trust and Fairness. For the start of a regular meeting, see check-in questions for team meetings, and for a conversation with one person, see one-on-one questions for direct reports. For more on running it at work, see Thesis for teams and classes. For the studies behind the deck, see the research. See the rules and the box. For the round that opens a meeting, see how to run a check-in.