Things in this Newsletter 🗞️

• 🌟 Continuous Improvement ideas

  • 🔄 Beyond Start / Stop / Continue

    • 1. Root in data.

    • 2. Bring in double Loop Learning.

    • 3. Try different formats

• Quick Facilitator’s Tip

• 🔥 Things you might like

• 🧐 Facilitate or Plan with Jo

🌟 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.

Start / Stop / Continue is probably the most popular retro format out there. It’s simple, accessible, and works in many contexts. However, many teams never move past this format, and many fail to incorporate crucial elements like data and decision-making into their retrospectives, which means that retrospectives can quickly lose their impact and value.

This month, I want to talk about why relying only on Start / Stop / Continue can trap teams in shallow patterns, and share what else you can do to deepen your retros.

🌟  Continuous Improvement ideas

• Experiment Log – Keep a log, journal, or list of what you’ve tried, what worked, and what didn’t, so learning compounds over time. Also, remember to go back to this and try some of these same ideas again. The team has changed, the context has changed, and what didn’t work before might work now because things are different. You can also use this as a whole retro format. Bring out all the old experiments and look at them through a new lens with deeper questions.

🔄 Beyond Start / Stop / Continue

Start / Stop / Continue asks for opinions before we have data.

Without a grounding in real data, we are asking for opinions, and every person in the room will be approaching this from a different perspective. If we have no data to start with, then we don’t create space to gain a shared understanding of the different perspectives in the room, and we are forming opinions and making judgments without a full understanding of what really happened. One of the things that can make retrospectives so powerful is creating a space to gain an understanding of what happened for other people on the team during the sprint. This creates the opportunity for growth, empathy and shared learning. It also means that the team can focus on solving a joint problem.

And when we run the same format sprint after sprint… we can end up getting the same results. We aren’t challenging anyone's thinking here, and we aren’t grounding the thinking in data, so we end up with everyone’s recency bias for what happened and what they want to improve. We can miss out on systemic improvements and the opportunity to get a deeper shared perspective of what happened and what the team's issues and challenges might be.

So what do you do instead? Great question. Here are some ideas from past issues and ways to improve your start, stop, and continue.

1. Root in data.

One idea to improve the start /stop/ continue is to root it in data. Shift your start /stop /continue to the Generate Insights part of the retro. Start the retro by Setting the Stage, getting everyone in the room, and creating your great container. Then either bring in some data or ask the team to think about everything that happened during the sprint and visualise that. You can use a timeline or colour-code themes, events, bugs, socials, work items, whatever makes sense for your context. Now that you have a rich picture of everything that happened and all the perspectives, it is a good time to ask: what do we want to start, what do we want to stop, and what do we want to continue? But you are basing those ideas on a rich and shared data set.

2. Bring in double Loop Learning.

Double-Loop Learning is about going beyond what happened and exploring why we operate this way in the first place. So that you can fully understand the problem you are trying to solve and whether it’s worth solving at all. Start by rooting in data and then ask about start, stop and continue based on the data. Once the team has gotten some ideas out there, go a little deeper. Decide on one or two things to interrogate, probably from the start or stop, and then ask the team questions, like

• What assumptions are we making that lead us to think this is the right thing?

• Why do we think this approach is the “right” one? Who or what taught us that?

• What team norms or habits are reinforcing this behaviour?

• When did we start doing it this way, and why have we kept it?

• What do we fear might happen if we stopped?

• What value is this activity or process bringing us? Is it still worth the effort?

• What’s the cost of continuing this behaviour?

• If we let this go, what would we gain?

• What other ways could we achieve the same outcome?

• If we were starting fresh today, would we design it this way?

• What would it look like if we did the opposite?

You can ask a few of these questions to interrogate the overall thinking of start, stop, or continue, or sometimes use them to help think about what to start, stop, and continue. To interrogate the data more deeply and think about it more thoroughly. I find that when I start to challenge a team like this, that is where the real value of retrospectives comes from, and also where the team starts to see and feel the value.

3. Try different formats

You can also let go of the stop/start/continue for a bit and try something new. This newsletter is a wealth of ideas, and here are some recent, detailed ones.

• Proud / Worried 

• The Spider chart

• The Waste retro

• The Sail Boat

💡SO….

Start / Stop / Continue isn’t “bad.” It’s just incomplete. We want to start with shared data, we want to challenge thinking, and we want to enable real growth and improvement. So challenge yourself and your team, and I’d love to know how it goes or what you find helpful here.

Quick Facilitator’s Tip

Rotate the facilitation role. Strictly speaking, when you facilitate, the goal is to stay out of the content and focus on the process. Rotating the facilitation role means that everyone gets a chance to hone their facilitation skills and to participate fully in the retrospective. Facilitating is not everyone’s jam though, so create a volunteer system instead of forcing those who aren’t comfortable

🔥 Things you might like

• ⚡ Tool: MetroRetro - Now Ludi is a very cool whiteboarding tool full of retro templates to use

Beehive is a fantastic newsletter platform that is easy to use, making it fun and straightforward to engage an audience with your message. Why not think about starting your newsletter: https://www.beehiiv.com?via=Joanne-Perold

My Remote Facilitation Course is for anyone who wants to learn how to create engaging online experiences for teams and people who need to work together, learn together or decide together. Here are the dates for the September course.

🧐 Facilitate or Plan with Jo

Did you know I can help plan your next retro or facilitate it for you? I have packages available for facilitation, planning, or being a sounding board. [email protected] is the email address to use for contact.

Did you know? Google's first storage array was built out of LEGO bricks.

In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin needed a cheap, expandable, and vibration-resistant case for ten 4GB hard drives. LEGOs were the perfect, customizable solution for what became a 40GB system.

Till next time,

Jo