Things in this Newsletter 🗞️

• 🌟 Continuous Improvement ideas

• 🔄 Beyond the Surface: What Double-Loop Learning R …

  • Here’s an example I see often:

  • How to incorporate double-loop learning.

  • 🪜 Exercise 1: Rewind the Ladder

• 🧠 Quick Facilitator’s Tip

  • 1. Silent Start, Strong Voices

  • 2. Start with Norm Kerth

• 🔥 Things you might like

🌟 Editor's Note

Welcome to another Retro Newsletter. If this is your first time here, I highly recommend reading this newsletter first it will give you the basics.

🌟  Continuous Improvement ideas

One team I worked with used to keep an “Awesome Board” it was a visual space on their team board where they kept ideas that anyone could add to improve things.

Once a week in standup, they would quickly check in on the ideas, and if anyone had any capacity, the team agreement was that they would pull from the awesome board first. That way, the team was continuously improving on things.

Some ideas they had:

Refactoring of specific pieces of code that were bugging everyone.

Looking for code that could be deleted, and making sure it was safe to do so. (Dead Code society)

🔄 Beyond the Surface: What Double-Loop Learning Really Means

When something goes wrong, it’s easy to jump straight into solution mode. We ask: “What happened?” and “How do we fix it?” That’s useful—but it's only part of the story.

This is what’s known as single-loop learning. It’s reactive. You spot a problem, you tweak the process, and you move on. This is what happens in many retrospectives, especially at the beginning when teams start out. But if you want to grow, not just adjust, you need to take one step further.

Enter: double-loop learning.

Double-loop learning asks a deeper question:
“What assumptions are we making that led us here?”

Instead of just fixing the problem, you want to start reflecting on the thinking behind the actions. Now, this is not easy to do.

Here’s an example I see often:

A team consistently misses their sprint goals.

Single-loop fix: We don’t estimate properly; we need to fix our estimation and estimate better.

What’s missing from this thinking is critical thinking. Why do we estimate? How do estimations help us? Are estimations and sprint goals tied to each other? Is this really a causal relationship?

As a coach and leader, it's important to help them think beyond the obvious and start to grow and challenge their beliefs and perceptions. If they continue to solve the symptoms, the problems themselves will persist, and this is a big reason why many teams think that retrospectives are a waste of time.

Double-loop thinking: How are we making decisions about what to commit to in a sprint? What contributes to us delivering on time, and what gets in our way?

Here, systems thinking tools like causal loop diagrams (I’ll share this tool in detail in the next newsletter) can be helpful in unpacking the systemic and entangled nature of the problem. They can give teams new perspectives, and create new options for where to start and what to do, or sometimes even allow a group to see new or hidden aspects.

It’s about helping a team go upstream, questioning the beliefs, values, and norms that shape how decisions are made. And yes, it can be uncomfortable, but that’s where transformation lives.

How to incorporate double-loop learning.

The best place to do this is during the generate insights phase of the retro. While we have shared data on the table, the team has identified an area or problem they want to dig into more.

Then you can start asking some new questions:

• What assumptions are we making here?

• Why do we always default to this process?

• What are we avoiding by sticking to this format?

• Are we solving the right problems?

• How do we know that our thinking about this is correct?

• What if we took a radically different approach here?

You could also use the ladder of inference to help unpack and challenge the thinking. Here is an example of an exercise

🪜 Exercise 1: Rewind the Ladder

Purpose: Help someone walk backward through their thinking process.

How to do it:

1. Ask a team member to share a recent conclusion or decision they made (e.g., "We shouldn’t involve the product owner in planning anymore").

2. As a group, work backward up the ladder with questions:

   • What data did you notice?

   • What did you focus on?

   • What meaning did you assign to it?

   • What assumptions were you making?

   • What beliefs or values influenced your conclusion?

Goal: Reveal where leaps in logic may have occurred and where assumptions can be re-examined.

Double-loop learning isn’t about being critical. It’s about being curious. It’s staying curious and focusing on growth for the team and the individuals. Double-loop learning is going to be what shifts your retros from mundane and routine to deeper problem-solving and team growth.

🧠 Quick Facilitator’s Tip

1. Silent Start, Strong Voices

Begin your retro with 3–5 minutes of silent reflection.
Why it works: It gives introverts space, avoids groupthink, and helps everyone arrive mentally.

2. Start with Norm Kerth

Using Norm Kerth's retro prime directive is still a great way to start a retro and set a tone of safety.

"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”

🔥 Things you might like

Session Lab curated a wonderful list of facilitation tools here 

Beehive is a fantastic newsletter platform that is so easy to use and makes it fun and easy to engage an audience if you have something to say. Why not think about starting your newsletter: https://www.beehiiv.com?via=Joanne-Perold

Did You Know? Slack Started as a Video Game
Slack was originally an internal tool built by a company that was developing a game called Glitch. The game flopped, but the team chat tool became the main product.

Till next time,

Jo