Category: When Retrospectives Go Wrong

How you facilitate a retrospective impacts the success for a retrospective. Inexperienced facilitators often don’t know how best to achieve the Decide What to Do part of a retrospective, often resulting in action items too broad, or too difficult to actually achieve. Revisiting them next time results in frustration as the team hasn’t made any progress on them.

Photo taken from Opheliates Flickr stream under the Creative Commons Licence

What you can do about it?
Sumeet writes about using SMART (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant and Timeboxed) to help focus forming better action items. He also writes about giving them an owner and a time frame. I will often use this to guide the discussion – “Is this achievable in two weeks time? How can we break this down to ensure we make some progress? Does everyone understand what you need to do to call this item complete?”

I also like Bas’ Plan of Action approach, linking short term actions with long term goals – allowing people to break down large changes into more achievable ones, or to help align short term tasks with longer, more strategic goals.

As a facilitator, be aware that how you deal with the last part of the retrospective will influence the result, for better or worse. Learn how to facilitate the group towards something more likely to result in an observable change.

Ever been in a meeting where the organiser doesn’t really know why they brought everyone together, or even have an agenda to start with? It devalues your time and you feel pretty frustrated. I’ve seen the same happen when facilitators don’t prepare for their retrospective. Preparing well demonstrates to participants respect for their time. Conversely a clear lack of preparation shows disrespect. Even though it doesn’t guarantee it, proper preparation ensures a better chance participants will be more willing to engage.

Image taken from Meredith Farmer’s Flickr photo stream under the Creative Commons licence.

What to do about it?
In preparing for the retrospective, I like to go through this list of questions:

• Who is the sponsor for the retrospective? – Sponsors may have extremely different agenda. Some of it may be about spreading lessons learned, others just want to understand the root cause of some major problem. You want to be clear about who the sponsor is and why you’re even running a retrospective. Is there just one person, or are there more of them?
• What are their goals, and what are you going to end up by the end of it? – Looking for ways to improve client relationships will have a completely different focus than understanding what new technical innovations came out of the project. The goals will heavily influence what exercises you plan for.
• Do you know how long the retrospective will be looking back? – Planning to look back over 1 week will be different from 3 months and different again from 1 year.
• Do you have an idea about what topics might come up? – A retrospective for a project where significant negative events dragged the team at certain stages will be different from a retrospective for a project that had less troublesome issues.
• Have you planned for enough time to cover everything? – You want to have enough time for people to tell their stories, unload any emotional baggage and get to understand what lessons are worth sharing.
• Do you have a good representation from team members? – Just having development members in a retrospective will skew what you talk about, perhaps missing important elements all the way from the sale, client relations, etc.

Just before starting the retrospective, also ensure that you have all the materials prepared – this may includes markers, pens, paper, sticky notes, handouts. Also ensure you have the room prepared with any posters or whiteboards you plan on using.

One of the most important points that Kerth, Larsen and Derby emphasise in their books is that the facilitator should not have an interest in the conversation. As I heard someone once say most succinctly, “If you have a point of view to share, you should not be facilitating”. This particular bad smell typically happens when this rule is violated. I’ve first hand seen this the most when a person in a naturally authoritative position (think project manager, technical or team lead) facilitates.

I remember sitting in one retrospective where the facilitator (a project manager) ran the retrospective pointing at people asking them for a single item (what went well/less well). They would often literally drill the person, asking for more details, and often commenting on their input, saying things like “that’s a pretty stupid idea”, or “you really should’ve done … instead of …” before turning around and writing it up on a flip chart. When they had finished, they decided which topics they wanted to talk about further, then returning to the group without even involving them in the decision making process. I sat, aghast, silently observing as people uncomfortably shifted in their seats wanting to get their stories out in the open yet afraid it wouldn’t go anywhere productive, and worse, be judged for it.

The result… an empty ritual, empowering a single individual, and the only outcome of no beneficial change.

The above image comes from Misschelle’s Flickr stream under the Creative Common’s licence

What to do about it?
The first step is to get an independent Retrospective Facilitator. Try really hard to get one. I know that finding facilitators are easy, and finding a retrospective facilitator may be more difficult though I’m sure you’ll find the results will be much better.

If you can’t find one and you’re the one facilitating, focus on the process, and less about the content. Your goal should be to ensure everyone has an opportunity to build the shared story, everyone has an opportunity to add their insights and everyone has input into the final solution. Do not push for the solution you think is best, and do not ignore people when they have something to say. Make it clear when you are expressing an opinion as a person-with-a-stake. Empower the group with a mechanism that gives you feedback when they feel you are directing the conversation too much. Believe me, it’s hard but it’s definitely worth it.

And what about the previous situation? Continue reading

I heard one story recently from a colleague where a technical lead facilitated the retrospective. They’d collected sticky notes from everyone, placed them around an exercise at the front and began reading them out. The strange thing is that they read only the ones they wanted to read out, blatantly skipping many of the others.

Why the lead would only read out the ones they did, I don’t know. Perhaps they thought they were the most important (based on their point of view), perhaps they were a random selection. I’m not sure. It’s clear what impact it had on the participants. People became frustrated that they weren’t being listened to, didn’t feel appreciated for their input, and I’m sure many of them felt the activity a waste of time. Apparently it broke down to the point where they started shouting out for the lead to read out the notes.

Image taken from TimmyGUNZ’s Flickr photo stream under the Creative Commons licence.

What to do about it?
Kerth emphasises getting an independent facilitator (though versed in the industry) to run your retrospective. From experience I know this to be difficult for heartbeat retrospectives. If so, people who have direct significant influence (i.e. typically project managers, technical or team leads) either shouldn’t facilitate, or be extremely aware of this conflict of interests and do something about it.

I’ve learned it’s important to be clear which, of your roles, you represent when you say something. Something like, “With my technical lead hat on, I’m wary of this suggestion because of …” Another technique is to accept you will be biased and ask the group to raise a flag you when they don’t feel you’re being neutral. If you see the flag, you must do something about it.

Concluding Thoughts
Facilitation is not for everyone. Participants and facilitators should understand where conflicts of interest lie and how it may affect some of the conversations. Mitigate for this by planning to have an independent facilitator or by putting another system in place to prevent these biases creeping in.