Retrospectives: a cocreated toolkit

What can facilitators learn from agile retrospectives for our own practice and debriefings? Last week, Karen Schmidt, Edith Steiner-Janesch [1] and I co-hosted a workshop on this topic during the European IAF Conference in Milan.

Retrospectives? Why, what, how?

We first introduced agile retrospectives as part of an iterative life cycle, based on the book “Agile Retrospectives” by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen.

Next up @AgileFac2019: @wiebkehere & @overthefencePM on #retrospectives – inviting the facilitators as peers to discover together how #agile and #facilitation practices are different from each other! #AgileFac2019 pic.twitter.com/72OtjgcxZ4

— IAF Europe & Middle East (@iaf_eme) May 3, 2019

Together with everyone, we then explored related terms in other contexts and discussed why, when and with whom we conduct these learning sessions.

#agilefacilitation @iaf_eme @IAFacilitators Have you ever consider / do you often or systematically / organise retrospective sequence in your projects / with your teams / stakeholders ? 🧐🤓😜 pic.twitter.com/1cYjkn0YJB

— Alexis Kummetat (@AlexisKummetat) May 3, 2019

A cocreated toolkit

We then split in small groups to cocreate a toolkit for teams that want to do retrospectives. Each group identified a set of methods spread across the phases of a retrospective and described them using a simple template.

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In the end, we had collected 30 different methods across the five phases of a retrospective.

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Download the toolkit

A big thanks to CoCreativeFlow, the IAF Conference team and all participants for this fun experiment!

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Update July 2019: If you prefer to listen to a reflection on this workshop and the links between agile approaches and agile, check out Enrice Teotti’s podcast This is Retrospective interviewing Karen and me.

[1] Edith unfortunately couldn’t join us in person in Milan, but was instrumental in the preparations (and created the beautiful templates).