Welcome back for another short reflection episode. This time we’ll talk about retro on retros.

Basically, it’s a retrospective on how we run retrospectives. It might sound kind of crazy, or it might sound super interesting.

After all, retrospectives are a time to pause, reflect and adjust. But they’re not static. There is no one size fits all retrospective. There is no checklist best practices that you can follow and get like a winning retrospective. It’s extremely contextual. And so there are practices that you can try and see if they work.

And if they don’t, you adjust, and a retro on retros is a time to do that kind of reflection. I like when I work with teams to do it with teams. But this event, this session that I’ve put online, so if you go to https://thisisretrospectivefacilitation.com/retro-on-retros, you’ll find a expression of interests where you can fill in your email, it’s going to be an event, an online event. And we’re gonna basically talk about our retrospectives.

Usually, the way it goes is the same way, the same structure that any other retrospectives around and earlier said, well, there isn’t like a checklist to go through. That is correct, but there is still a structure like the what, so what now what adaptive action from ages the. And so retro retros will work the similar way. Again, it depends a little bit on how many people show up, but in general, it’s There’s a time for introduction to find out what everyone wants to get out of that session. so that everyone can kind of be present. In order to set the stage. Make sure that it’s a safe environment. So that’s another point. This session is for everyone. People with experience and people that are new to retrospectives. And everyone should feel welcomed and welcoming, and everyone always learned. learn something from from everyone else. So we we should all come in with that mindset. The first thing that we do then is start collecting anecdotal stories about our retrospectives, or topics that we want to discuss. I like to use the anecdotal format and to sell have the people add in their story itself signified our stories, and things like tags, for example. We can then maybe find patterns, find things that are in common, and again, depending on the size of the group, we might break into breakout groups or keep the conversation in one room and talk for 10 minutes about that cluster, that pattern that we see emerging. And maybe find some action items, some recommendation for those those contexts, maybe generate some insights, and then move on to the next cluster The next topic. In other cases, if we do breakout groups, the breakout groups might pick different topics, we might have tables and people discussing some of those topics. Again, it really depends on the on the size of the group, the biggest takeaway will be to bounce ideas off our peers. So if you find yourself alone, designing your retrospectives or you find that your retrospective doesn’t quite work the way you’d like it to. Maybe you feel there’s something weird about it.

This might be a good session to join and to bring your your Your thoughts to the group there’s also the Slack channel so if you go to https://thisisretrospectivefacilitation.com/slack you’ll find a free slack forum where you can ask questions and bounce ideas off peers. I’m looking forward to speak with you during the upcoming retro on retros. So go to https://thisisretrospectivefacilitation.com/retro-on-retros and fill in sign up for the for the newsletter.