Do you feel safe in your team retrospectives?

Agile retrospectives give us a great opportunity to inspect and adapt our way of working. It can be used as a reflection opportunity for the work being done in a sprint, release or any other frequency such as quarterly reflection.

What is your safety feeling throughout the retrospective?

For a team retrospective to be effective and successful, participants need to feel secure within the group. Safety must be developed and maintained throughout the retrospective. Everyone participating in the retrospective has equal responsibility in maintaining and ensuring safety and trust within the group. In the ideal world, retrospectives are the place where you can share and open up your challenges and find solutions for those. However in reality many retrospectives are turned up to be an unsafe environment. People would be treated differently after the retrospectives for being open and transparent.

Even though maintaining and ensuring safety is everyone’s responsibility, Facilitators play a major role in ensuring safety and trust throughout the retrospective.

How can we set the safety and trust?

Norm Kerth the author of the book “Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review” shared a great idea of prime directive to enable the safety and trust culture right from the beginning of the retrospective.

He shared a prime directive any facilitator can communicate at the beginning of the retro to establish a right culture of trust and safety.

Prime Directive

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Prime Directive helps us to create the right culture in our retrospectives and make it a positive and outcome oriented event. It makes a retrospective become an effective team gathering to reflect and find ideas to improve the way of working.

Try prime directive in your next retro and share the feedback.

Happy retrospective..!!