“If you adopt only one agile practice let it be retrospectives. Everything else will follow.”
Woody Zuill
Agile retrospectives will help teams to inspect and adapt at regular intervals. Both scrum guide and agile manifesto highlight the importance of reflections at regular intervals.
- Retros create room for reflection (“reflect”, Agile Manifesto)
- Retros aim to increase effectiveness (“become more effective, Agile Manifesto)
- Retros aim to increase quality (Scrum Guide, 2020)
- Retros help the team to identify next steps (Scrum Guide, 2020)
- and “adjusts its behavior accordingly” (Agile Manifesto)
However in reality many retrospectives are not helping the teams. One of the reasons behind unsuccessful retrospectives is the lack of facilitation skills.
While facilitating a few workshops for scrum masters about retrospectives , I was thinking about creating a simple canvas for them to prepare for the retrospectives as well as reflect on their facilitation skills post retrospective. Here is the initial version of the retrospective canvas. Feel free to use it and spread the word to the agile community. I’m happy to listen in to the improvement ideas or suggestions. Feel free to reach out to me with your valuable feedback.
How to use this canvas
This canvas is inspired by the 5 stages created by Diana Larsen, Esther Derby in their book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. If you haven’t read that book I would recommend you to read the book.
Great facilitators prepare beforehand, they plan the ground rules, tools, activities, metaphors and schedule, they keep the focus on the participants, and above all, work to achieve the retrospective goal. Every retrospective is a learning for the facilitator too. This canvas can use as a preparation tool for the upcoming retrospectives and a reflection tool for the one which is done .
Prepare with 5 stages
There are 5 stages for agile retrospectives. you can see 5 different blocks in the canvas. Each block represents various stages. Start with “ Set the Stage”, create an outline on what are you going to do in this stage, what tools metaphors or techniques you are going to use and how much time you are going to spend. The same technique is applicable for the other stages such as gathering data, Generate Insights, Deciding what to do and closing the retrospective. Every stage we should prepare an alternative plan or activity which will be useful if we couldn’t manage time in the previous stage.
Heart and Brain 🧠 ❤️
Reflections will help us to improve our facilitating skills. We should spend some time doing a self-reflection on how did we facilitate the retrospective. It’s a feeling which comes from our heart and thinks about how can we improve the facilitation next time. In this block, we are going to use our heart(Feeling) Brain (thinking) together to sharpen our skills.
If you have questions on how to use this canvas, please reach out to me.
Happy retrospective..!!
“There is a way to do it better — find it!”
Thomas A. Edison
Retrospective Facilitator Canvas © 2022 by Ginu Samuel is licensed under Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International