The role of Facilitator is fundamental for almost every meeting. The Facilitator ensures that the whole group is empowered to make decisions and that every individual has their voice heard.
During a retrospective, the Facilitator role is crucial. In a retrospective, it is ideal that everyone has at least some degree of participation, and it is the Facilitator that helps the participants with that.
This document describes a way of how to facilitate a retrospective.
- http://schadavis.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ao_facilitation_resource_sheet_july_2014.pdf
- https://retromat.org/
- http://www.funretrospectives.com/
- https://trello.com/b/40BwQg57/retrospective-techniques-for-coaches-scrum-masters-and-other-facilitators
- https://medium.com/@stephanhoekstra/retrospectives-solve-problems-with-retromat-84d7a8d2f25d
- https://theretrospectivegame.com/
In its simplest form, a bunch of people:
- meet
- talk about stuff and
- agree on some actions (that will hopefully improve the situation).
Usually retrospectives are a little more sophisticated than that. Most follow the 5 phases suggested in Agile Retrospectives:
- Set the stage => Set the goal; Give people time to "arrive" and get into the right mood
- Gather data => Help everyone remember; Create a shared pool of information (everybody sees the world differently)
- Generate insight => Why did things happen the way they did? Identify patterns; See the big picture
- Decide what to do => Pick a few issues to work on and create concrete action plans of how you'll address them
- Close the retrospective => Clarify follow-up; Appreciations; Clear end; How could the retrospectives improve?
Those phases are not always clearly separated, but they are all relevant.
The retrospective is a great moment to talk about issues in a team. However, the team should not wait for that moment to address issues and discuss improvements. The smaller the feedback loop, the quicker the team can improve itself. Continuous improvement, is hard when the team only thinks about that during the retrospectives.
Before Facilitating, it is recommended going over the checklist below:
- Room availability
- Post-its
- Sharpies
- Whiteboard markers
- Whatever else is necessary for the chosen format
People often assume that everyone knows why they are in a retrospective. Unfortunately, that is very often not the case. The POWER technique helps the Facilitator to put everyone on the same page right at the beginning of the meeting. See below how it can be used for a retrospective:
- Purpose (why is the meeting necessary?)
- We have retrospective so we force an opportunity to inspect ourselves and adapt to our environment. We focus on what we worked but most importantly how.
- Outcomes (what do we want to achieve, where's the value in the meeting?)
- We expected that at the end of the retrospective we have Action Points and/or Team Agreements that will help up to be better and happier!
- What's in it for them (why should participants attend the meeting?)
- You're participating because, as a team member, you're opinion, concerns, and pain points are important for all of us, and it's not ideal to have agreements without the whole team.
- Engagement (how are you going to ensure that participants are engaged?)
- So participate, give your opinion, share your thoughts and feelings.
- Keep in mind that everyone did their best, and whatever we talk here is just because we want to make things better for everyone.
- Hate the game, not the player.
- Roles and responsibilities (who does what?)
- I will be facilitator, but as a team member I will bring up topics as well.
- No cellphones or notebooks allowed.
Along with that it can nice to do an activity to set up the mood, for example:
- Know your neighbour: Opening
- Positive and True
- ESVP: Explorer, Shopper, Vacationer, Prisoner
- Safety check
While gathering data, consider following the steps below in that order, and the tips under the topics:
- Explaining the format (≈1m)
- You may also want to give participants options of different formats.
- If you have a specific format in mind, explaining why you chose it may help you to archive your goals.
- If your activity uses post-its, it will be helpful to tell participants how many they can white, what type of content you are expecting, and how long do they have to write them.
- Writing post-its (≈5m)
- You may want to time box this step to save some time and narrow the focus.
- Having one topic per post-it helps organising them later.
- Depending on the number of participants, you may want to limit the number of post-its a participant can write.
- Putting post-its on the board (≈10m)
- Allowing participants to read their post-its out loud before putting them on
the board ensures everyone knows about everyones opinions:
- Ask each participant to read the post-its and stick it into the board.
- Tell participants that there shouldn't be discussions, but questions are allowed when someone cannot understand the post-it.
- Grouping the post-its per topic (≈2m)
- It is better that the participants do the grouping themselves, or else the Facilitator stays too much on spot.
- You may want to play a song in the meantime, like Don't Worry Be Happy.
- Writing a topic on top of the grouped post-its makes it easy to identify them later.
- Dot voting (≈2m)
- Depending on the number of topics you may want to ask participants to use Dot Voting on the topics they want to discuss.
- Limiting the number of votes in maximum three helps to narrow the options.
Some examples of activities:
- Mad Sad Glad
- 4 Ls: Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For
- Sailboat
- Hopes and Concerns
- RAID: Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies
Usually, because of time constraints, intercalating those phases work better than clearly separating them. We can discuss a topic and write action points right after the discussion.
During the discussion, it is crucial that the Facilitator focus on the container and not in the content. That means that rather discussion with the participants, the Facilitator will:
- Make sure everyone understands the topic under discussion.
- Make sure everyone participates.
- Make sure the topic under discussion does not change.
- Make sure the meeting is on time.
- Make sure toxic behaviors don't spread out.
- Make sure that no one highjacks the meeting.
Because the discussions can take quite some time, it is better to time box it. After ensuring that all participants have to say about the topic, before jumping into creating Action Points, it is good to check if everyone is on the same page. You may, for example, ask:
- Are there any doubts about what we discussed so far?
- Is the problem clear to everyone?
- Is there anything that needs to be said before we start to think about Action Points?
The facilitator should not engage in the discussion, as they naturally have a lot of power over a meeting. As a facilitator, try to put your personal preferences on the side as much as possible to allow participants to talk freely about the topics.
It is also the facilitator role to help the participants to reflect on the topic and try to get different perspectives about it. As a facilitator, try to ask Open-ended questions to the participants, like:
- What is your perspective on the topic?
- What has already been done to solve this issue?
- What is the worse it can happen if things stay this way?
- How does that influence you?
You may also use Close-ended questions when the answer is fundamental for the discussion, but be cautious.
If you see that the discussion has passed your timebox, or that it is dragging too much anyways, you may use Roman Voting so participants can decide themselves whether they want to keep talking about it or not.
When the majority voted "no," it may be a good idea to create an Action Point to address the topic on a different occasion. Doing that helps participants do not feel like they wasted their time, especially for people who voted "yes."
There are two ways the Facilitator can do that:
- Facilitate the discussion and write the action points themselves: sometimes it's necessary, but it may be tricky to find consensus in the action point.
- Facilitate the discussion and let participants write action points themselves: consensus is not always necessary, and it creates a better feeling of ownership. You may want to use a format for that, like:
If possible, end the meeting with a positive note and don't forget to thank participants for their presence.
If there is time, you may want to run a quick activity to close the meeting:
- One word before leaving
- Know your neighbour - Closing
- Note to Self
- Feedback Door - Smilies
- Know Your Meme
After Facilitating, it is recommended going over the checklist below:
- Take pictures of the whiteboard(s)
- Clear whiteboard(s)
- Throw post-its into a recycle bin.
- Write document about the retrospective.
I hope that can be helpful while Facilitating retrospectives. Good luck!