This document discusses ways to keep retrospectives fresh as teams mature. It provides six techniques: Picture This, Timeline, The Five Hows, Adding Appreciation to the Mix, Fish Bowl, and Weather Forecast. Picture This uses drawing to express how team members feel about a sprint. Timeline visually maps out key events of a sprint. The Five Hows dives deeper into issues by repeatedly asking "how." Adding Appreciation to the Mix adds an appreciation section to traditional feedback. Fish Bowl structures discussions around topics. Weather Forecast uses weather metaphors to gauge team sentiment. These techniques help energize retrospectives and gain new insights as team challenges evolve over time.

1. Keeping Retrospectives Fresh
Alida Cheung

2. During initial adoption, teams focus on…
 Learning the new game rules
 Changing their mindset
 Putting something which may seem counter-intuitive
into practice

3. As teams mature…
 Their challenges evolve
 They go deeper
 Problems can become harder to solve
 Retrospective becomes mundane and its effectiveness
wanes
 “What didn’t go well” may only identify the symptoms
but not the cause

4. Six ways to keep retrospectives fresh
 Picture This
 Timeline
 The Five Hows
 Adding Appreciation to the Mix
 Fish Bowl
 Weather Forecast

5. Picture This
Adopted from Collaboration
Explained by Jean Tabaka

6. Picture This
 How it works
 Divide the team into groups of 3 or 4
 Give the groups 5 minutes to show how they feel
about the sprint in drawing
 Take note as they explain their pictures. Facilitate
the discussion to dive into the root cause if
necessary. Find out what particularly drove any
strong positive or negative images
 Put up the pictures and ask the team to sum up the
results

7. Picture This
 Why it works
 The new format vitalizes and
Hard to reach
energizes the retrospective goals
 It provides people another way to
look at a situation and a different
medium to express it
 It taps into our right brain, our Short of
intuitive and insightful mind that hours
see things more holistically,
balancing out the judgment or
even prejudice
 It is easy to reference in the future (e.g. Remember that cookie
jar?)

8. Picture This
 When to use
 You feel the retrospective has gone stale
 The team is stuck at the mechanics of the retrospective
Many open bugs
but burndown chart
looks good
Support cases set
everyone on fire
We made progress
on automation 

9. Timeline
Adopted from Diana and Esther’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures at Agile 2008

10. Timeline
 How it works
 Draw a line that represents the sprint
 Ask the team to recall what happened over the
course of the sprint – events, metrics, features,
stories, meetings, surprises, and decisions, etc. –
and put them on the timeline
 Facilitate the identification of any correlation, cause-
and-effect, or pattern, etc. and the discussion

11. Timeline
 Why it works
 Provides a holistic picture of the sprint
 Visually reliving the sprint chronologically helps the team
discover cause and effect, missed opportunities, and areas of
improvement
 When to use
 The sprint is particularly difficult, hectic, chaotic, and/or
stressful

12. The Five Hows
Adopted from an exercise at
the UX Retreat in 2010

13. The Five Hows
 How it works
 Similar to “The Five Whys” by Sakichi Toyada
 Pick one issue or pain point
 Keep exploring on how to solve the previous answer
till actionable items are reached
 For example,
 Q - “How can we deliver reliably?”
 A - “We need to complete our tasks consistently.”
 Q - “How do we complete our tasks consistently?”
 A - “We need to handle distractions effectively.”
 Q - “How do we hand distractions effectively?”
 …

14. The Five Hows
 When to use
 The team wants to deep dive into and fix one pain point (likely
to be recurring)

15. Add Appreciation to the Mix
Adopted from Diana and Esther’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures at Agile 2008

16. Add Appreciation to the Mix
 How it works
 It is a variation to the traditional three-question
format
 Instead of three, it has four feedback categories:
• Team proud of
• Team sorry about
• Appreciation
• New Ideas

17. Add Appreciation to the Mix
 Why it works
 “Team proud of” and “Team sorry about” encourage reflection
as a team
 “Appreciation” provides team members an opportunity to show
their appreciation towards each other, building a stronger team
 “New idea” allows the team to decide what improvements they
want to work on
 When to use
 Any time

18. Fish Bowl

19. Fish Bowl
 Fish Bowl is a form of dialog used frequently in
participatory events like Open Space and Unconference
 It has been used successful in retrospectives with a
team of as few as seven people

20. Fish Bowl
 How it works
 Pick one topic
 Put four to five chairs in the front of the room
 People in those chairs will carry out a discussion
 One chair remains empty at all time
 A member of the audience can come up and occupy
the empty chair and join the conversation. At that
point, one person leaves the discussion to empty
his/her chair
 Facilitate the discussion to a conclusion as
appropriate

21. Fish Bowl
 When to use
 Fish Bowl introduces some structure into a discussion which
may otherwise be heated or emotionally charged

22. Weather forecast
Adopted from Diana and Esther’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures at Agile 2008

23. Weather Forecast
 How it works
 At the beginning of the retrospective, ask each team member
to describe how he/she feels about the sprint in terms of the
weather
 Conduct the retrospective
 Base on the result of the retrospective, especially in areas the
team choose to work on, ask each team member to predict the
weather for the next sprint

24. Weather Forecast
 Why it works
 Many times you will see a range of weather report or forecast,
from sunny to stormy, providing powerful insight in how
different members react and respond to the same reality
 Offers an opportunity to further explore specific issue or topic
 When to use
 Any time
 This is not a complete retrospective by itself but can add flavor
and insight to one

25. References
 Tabaka, J. (2006). Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for
Software Project Leaders. Addison-Wesley Professional.
 Derby, E. & Larsen, D. (2006). Agile Retrospectives: Making Good
Team Great. Pragmatic Bookshelf.

26. Alida Cheung
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alida-cheung/0/683/211
Twitter: AlidaCheung