6 Tried & True Ways to Get Teams to Participate in Retrospectives--without Pulling Teeth
Everyone has been in that dreaded retrospective where—wait for it—dead, freakin’ silence. Not a mouse to be heard in the room. What’s a Scrum Master to do?
Recently, our Agile Mentors Community shared some pretty great ideas. We hope you can take a few of these back to your team when it seems as if you are pulling teeth to get people to participate in retrospectives.
Enlist a different facilitator.
If things have gotten stale, try asking another team member or another Scrum Master to facilitate the retrospective event.
Maybe the team has become bored and complacent and this will give them a sense of newness once again. Or perhaps there is a deeper relationship issue going on where the team doesn’t feel a sense of safety. If so, this is a good opportunity to uncover any trust issues.
Accept the silence.
Another technique that may feel weirdly uncomfortable is simply to let the uncomfortable silence exist. It is our natural human instinct to jump in if there is more than 10 seconds of silence, but don’t. Eventually someone will break the silence, and it’s best if that someone is not the Scrum Master.
Ask questions.
A Scrum Master’s job during the retrospective is not to lecture the team or run the meeting. If you find that you are doing all the talking, use the Socratic questioning method to draw others into the conversation. In other words, answer a statement with another question.
For example, if Bob says, “This sprint was a disaster,” you might ask, “Why do you think it was a disaster, Bob?” Bob might reply, “Because we didn’t meet our sprint commitment.” You might then ask, “What do you think got in the way of meeting your sprint commitment?”
Run a Self-Check
Another way to engage teams in conversation is to ask them to assess how they’re doing and feeling. Members of the Agile Mentors Community came up with some great ideas to make these self-checks easier. Two of our favorites were Squad Health Check and Scores on the Door.
Squad Health Check
Spotify has a squad health check model that you can download for free. The team members rate themselves, then see how they score. The idea is to take areas where they didn’t score well and use them as discussion topics and potential team improvements.
Scores on the Door
Scores on the Door is a technique from a team in New Zealand. To try it, team members enter the room and take two sticky notes each. On each note, they write a number between 0 and 10, where 0 is abysmal and 10 is perfect. The first score is for how they’re feeling themselves and the second is for how they’re feeling about the project. Then, each team member places their two scores on the door.
Scores should be anonymous, but do invite people to volunteer to reveal their scores as part of a conversation about how to get to (or stay at) a 10. You might even want to record the scores from retrospective to retrospective to see how the scores change over time.
Play Games
The fifth way to revitalize retrospectives is to structure them as games. Playing games is a fun way to break the ice. Here are a few our members recommend:
Retrospective Pong
A fun game coming from a team member in Texas is Retrospective Pong. First, fill cups with one retrospective question each and place them in a triangle on one end of a table. Then divide into pairs. Now play begins. The first pair stands at the opposite end of the table from the cups. That pair gets one try each to successfully throw a ping pong ball into one of the cups. If one member of the pair lands the ball in a cup, the other person in that pair answers the question inside the cup, and the cup is removed from the table. If neither person succeeds in getting a ball in the cup, the next pair takes their turn, following the same rules. Play continues until all the cups have been removed from the table.
The Lego Retrospective
Create a figure out of LEGO® bricks that represents the next important step for the team in order to get better. There are a few variations you can do with this game. Click here to learn more.
Retromat
The Retromat website offers several other retrospective game ideas such as Spot the Elephant, Weather Report, Mad/Sad, Speedboat/Sailboat and a number of other creative ideas.
Try a New Structure
To engage team members from the beginning of the retrospective, try spending the first part of each retrospective asking the team to structure the meeting. The Lean Coffee format, described on www.leancoffee.org, is a great way to get teams to submit ideas and set a timebox for discussion. The site also has a section called Distributed Lean Coffee with techniques that work really well for remote teams.
To learn more great retrospective ideas (and a whole lot more), join the Agile Mentors Community. Visit www.agilementors.com for more information on membership.