December. The period when we look forward to time slowing down again for a while. Work meetings are replaced by family gatherings and we, together with the people closest to us, evaluate the year that is slowly getting behind us. You know it – you sit at the table after dinner, a glass of bubbles in your hand, and you ask each other: What have we achieved? What would we like to change? What resolutions will we make for next year?
I was indirectly taught to do such an end-of-the-year retrospective by my father a long time ago. And when I met the concept of retrospective again as part of Scrum events and agile development, I just smiled and said to myself that it would be easy, because I have over 30 years of experience with this. How wrong I was! 🙂 And I was happy to admit my mistake publicly – in the Skillmea lecture room, where we as a company were given space for presentation during Profesia days.
Talking in a 5-person team made up entirely by your family, or discussing with people who see each other every day, know and trust each other, is easy. But to get feedback from a team that works remotely, even on 3 world continents, and speaks different languages natively, is really wild.
How to ask questions in the team to get answers from people? How do you get them to tell you more than just yes and no? What should be taken into account to create a space for people to respond willingly and constructively? I tried to answer all this to the audience during my lecture.
How to do the first retrospective?
Imagine that you have a team that has successfully mastered the first weeks of cooperation, and now it’s time for its premiere retrospective.
Phase 0: The ten commandments of good retrospectives
First, introduce them to the “golden rules” of retrospectives. These are as follows:
- We build trust and provide a safe environment for discussion.
- The retrospective is always led by one facilitator.
- What happens during the retrospective, remains within the team – unless, of course, a task arises outside the team that we agreed on and needs to be communicated.
- We don’t blame each other, but we look for common solutions to situations and problems.
- Everyone is involved, no one is dominant.
- Enough is enough 🙂 When a discussion revolves around one topic for too long, it needs to be interrupted and you need to move on.
- We try to be present with our thoughts. Otherwise, we prefer not to take part in the retrospective at all.
- We celebrate even small wins. In short – let’s praise each other.
- Let’s keep moving forward. In the form of giving feedback as well.
- Let’s not interrupt each other.
Phase 1: Team mood
You can then proceed to the first stage of the retrospective, which is the team mood.
Let’s face it, if you have a long day and the 10:00 retrospective is your third meeting in a row, you may not be in the mood for big conversations. You are also probably not very talkative if the outcome of your work over the last two weeks hasn’t been as you would like it to be.
And it’s the icebreaker questions that serve us to disengage and retune our thoughts. For example:
- To relax the team: If you were invisible for one day, what would you do?
- To improve team collaboration: What help from your colleagues would you need but didn’t ask for?
- To help people in the team get to know each other better: If you had the ability to teleport, where would you go now?
- To boost morale and motivation: What was something that you gave your 100% lately?
- To create a safe environment before difficult topics: What is the difference between confrontation and conversation?
- To create a safe and open environment: Which color would best describe your feelings right now and why?
Many times, it’s such “off-topic” questions at the beginning of a meeting that can make people wake up and start a debate in a positive way 🙂
Phase 2: Feedback
Once you have people awake, you can move on to the second phase. These are questions aimed at feedback and evaluation of the last 2-3 weeks or a month. But before you start asking, answer the following questions yourself:
- What phase of the project are we in?
- What is the maturity of the team and their experience with retrospectives?
- Have we already had a joint retrospective and if so, in what form?
- Have there been any unforeseen situations in the team recently?
- Did the team deliver what they committed to?
- What’s the atmosphere within the team?
- Is this meeting online or live?
- What is the composition of the team? Are introverts or extroverts predominant?
Based on the answers, you’ll then choose the form of starting the discussion more appropriately.
If the team is inexperienced, you can help yourself with one of the established methods. For example, suggest 3 columns and 3 basic questions to be answered by people. As a tool, you can use any of the available online services, such as retrotool.io, or even an ordinary whiteboard. In this case, people can write their answers on pieces of paper and stick them into columns.
Other well-established columns are, for example:
- Start – Stop – Continue: A universal format suitable for most retrospectives, often used as the first format in a new team.
- Pride and Joy – Personal Improvements – Team Improvements: Particularly appropriate when the team morale needs to be encouraged.
- Wishes – Risks – Appreciations – Puzzles = WRAP: Ideal when you need a little positivity after a challenging project, before starting a new big bulk, or when you want to reveal new ideas.
Now we’re going to jump into the future. Imagine that your team is already well-coordinated and you want to ask people differently, with your own questions. What should they look like?
- The questions should engage the whole team, not just the dominant individuals.
- Give preference to open-ended questions that may have multiple, equally valid answers, rather than just a yes/no answer.
- Prepare questions that help the team take responsibility for the discussion.
- Avoid creating awkward situations for team members.
If you want to translate this into reality, questions about what the team failed to do could look like this:
- Which unexpected events happened, if at all, during the last period/since the last feedback?
- What was stressing or worrying you?
- Could the TEAM handle things differently? How?
- Do you think YOU could have handled things differently? How?
Conversely, if you want to find out what the team did successfully, the questions might look like the following:
- What have you been proud of lately?
- What has motivated you in recent weeks?
- What should we focus on to continue the “winning streak” and deliver work on time?
- What have we achieved that we should celebrate?
And questions about team well-being/discomfort could take the form of:
- Imagine that we are all superheroes. What have been the supernatural abilities of our team over the past weeks?
- How would you describe the overall team dynamics?
- How do you feel about work-life balance?
- Is there anything you admire about any of your colleagues’ recent work? What is it?
Other questions could include topics such as: what have we learned, what are the planned goals, what value has the team added and so on. The possibilities are literally endless 🙂
Phase 2 is done, you asked the questions, you’ve given people 10 minutes to answer. What will the next phases look like?
Phases 3-5: Data sorting, discussion and positive conclusion
Phase 3 is data gathering. During this, you’ll group the common topics that you found in the answers, and vote for their importance.
Phase 4 represents a joint debate, a discussion on solutions and the importance of changes, and, if necessary, the creation of action points, i.e. tasks to be solved in the future.
The final stage 5 is ending the meeting so that people take away a positive emotion from it.
Although the retrospective has only these 5 established phases, I’d like to add one more that emerged from the informal discussion after the lecture on the Profesia days: Ensure that the action points agreed on in the retrospective are also transparently implemented. And I can only agree with this new phase 🙂
