Your teams 1st retrospective will be your hardest retrospective

High emotions, Intertwined issues and Inexperience are the key challenges that will all combine to make your 1st retrospective the hardest retrospective you have to facilitate. This situation is similar to your first driving lesson being on a rainy night, while you are surrounded by drunk drivers. Luckily there are steps you can take to tackle all three key challenges, and run the teams first retrospective successfully.

High emotions

For teams that have not had an effective avenue to express and tackle their day to day work issues; there tends to be a lot of emotion released in their first retrospective. During the retrospective team often realise they have a voice and are being listened to; hence a lot of the issues they have been frustrated about are vented. The emotional venting that occurs is hard to hear yet often therapeutic for all involved. If you and the team can turn those emotions into actions that address some of the teams’ frustrations they will not just like retrospectives they will love them.

Mitigation actions 

1. Display the Prime Directive and read it out as part of your introduction.
2. Acknowledge all input provided by the team, even if you disagree with it. You only have to acknowledge what is said, you do not need to agree with it. Merely the simple act of acknowledge is enough for the team to feel heard and hence reduce the level of emotion in the room below boiling point. The easiest way to acknowledge their input is to read out all of the post-it notes that they write out in the gathering data phase.

Intertwined issues

New teams and existing teams that have not held retrospectives previously; will often have their first retrospective dominated by a tangled mess of intertwined issues. The trouble is that one or two root causes are creating many, many symptoms and likely a lot of frustration. So no matter which symptom the team selects to analyse; it is intertwined with several other symptoms. This tangled mess drives the team conversation around in useless circles unless structured techniques are used to untangle the mess.

Mitigation actions

1. Ensure you have plenty of time to discuss the first topic
1. Schedule 90 minutes for the retrospective, one hour is just not enough time
2. Time box the early parts of the retrospective to ensure enough time for discussion at the end.
2. Accept it is likely that the team will only get to analyse the top priority issue. The good news is that addressing just one issue will be big success for your first retrospective!
3. Use Tree Root Diagrams to help untangle the intertwined symptoms.

Inexperience

When this is the first retrospective for the team, yourself or both, there are likely to be feelings of excitement, anticipation, apprehension, uncertainty, etc. Also the role of facilitator is challenging at the best of times, as you attempt to juggle time-boxing, active listening, note taking and group facilitation. Thankfully there are plenty of resources available to prepare you and the team. Here are just a few approaches to get you started…

Mitigation actions for your inexperience

1. Observe retrospectives run by more experienced facilitators.
2. Pair with an experienced facilitator for your first retrospective.
3. Delegate Time keeping to someone in the team.
4. Delegate taking notes to someone in the team.

Mitigation actions for the Teams’ inexperience

1. Circulate the retrospective objective and agenda ahead of time
2. Provide the team with Retrospective Prompting questions a couple of days prior to the retrospective.