Common Retrospectives Traps and Solutions

GOTOpia November 2020

Improve your retrospectives by awareness of antipatterns.

Make your retrospectives enjoyable and effective.

Retrospectives are indispensable for continuous learning and improvement in Lean, Agile, DevOps, and other contexts. But too many organizations run retrospectives “in name only,” and fail to generate the value they promise. In this talk, Aino introduces challenges that undermine the effectiveness of retrospectives, and shows exactly how to overcome each of them.

Using the familiar “patterns” approach, Aino describes antipatterns related to team and meeting structure, inadequate or counterproductive planning, human interaction, and much more. From “blaming and naming” to too much smalltalk, negativity to cultural disconnects in distributed teams, Aino reveals traps she’s encountered in leading hundreds of retrospectives -- and presents proven solutions. We will look at body language, psychology behind retrospectives, online retrospectives, different types of retrospectives, etc. With her insights and guidance, you can run retrospectives that deliver actionable improvements and concrete value. Or at least acknowledge when you make the same mistakes as her.

Target audience: Facilitators, project leaders, managers, coaches, team leaders, Scrum Masters

Prerequisites: Have facilitated retrospectives or wants to facilitate them in the future

Attendees: Join the #teams channel on Slack to send your questions to Aino