How REAL Retrospectives Get Your Team Improving

January 30, 2025 – Mitch Goldstein, Agile Transformation Consultant

The twelfth principle of the Agile Manifesto calls on us to occasionally stop what we are doing and take a look back and reflect on what we have done in order to improve. Most agile teams do conduct a team retrospective, but are they really doing what the Manifesto is calling us to do?

Many teams that are new to the practice will spend some time, typically thirty minutes, to conduct what they call a ‘retrospective’. They will assemble the team and allow the team a few minutes to think about an entire iteration of work, and characterize things they thought went well and things that did not go well. Engagement is typically low, and problems are not examined in detail. 

Are teams doing performative retrospectives to ‘check the box’ that they are being done? It seems that frequently no improvement items are generated. Just as frequently, the whole affair is forgotten and the team goes back to their individual work.

Two important facets of agility are working iteratively to acquire fast feedback and the notion of continuous, relentless improvement. There are ample opportunities to rethink retrospectives and make them more agreeable and effective and less of a chore.

Challenges with Retrospectives

When trying to encourage teams to do retrospectives, we encounter the following challenges:

• Lack of Engagement – people and teams have become disconnected from the original intention of retrospection and consequently do not consider it important enough to give it the attention it requires and deserves.
• Repetitive Discussions – the same problems come up every time and sometimes represent issues that the team cannot have any direct impact upon.
• The ‘Blame’ Game – sometimes retrospectives become a search for a head for the chopping block rather than a proactive effort to improve.
• Actionable Outcomes – problems are identified but the team does not feel empowered to make changes, sometimes due to a false notion of ‘consistency’ over adaptability and specialization.
• Trust and Transparency Struggles – in environments where trust is an issue, people feel that identifying problems and seeking root causes can be a wholly negative experience. 
• Time-consuming and Ineffective – all of these problems make people and teams feel that the retrospective does not have the necessary ‘bang for the buck’, or that the time slated for retrospectives would be better off spent on other activities.

Although there are literally thousands of different retrospective styles, the majority of them are based on the ‘three questions’ approach of “What went well”, “What didn’t go well”, and “What can we do better”. Although this seems to be an obvious and intuitive approach, these questions cannot penetrate into how the iteration began and consequently unfolded. These fundamental details are essential to successful retrospection as they retell the story of what exactly happened.

In order to address these issues, we are issuing a call to action across the industry to re-examine the rationales behind retrospectives and discard stale thinking and hackneyed techniques. Over the course of the next several articles, we will introduce some revolutionary new approaches, expansion of existing practices, and attempt to refocus our attention and energy into discovering how teams can put themselves on a more reliable roadmap to self-improvement.

REAL Retrospectives

The REAL mnemonic can help us identify a flow that reconnects teams with the work they have just completed.

R – Reflect: The retrospective begins with a reflection on what happened during the past iteration or sprint. This involves gathering data and feedback from the team and its stakeholders about their experiences during the iteration. We engage in an honest and productive ‘retrospective’ when we look back at what has happened and retell the story with highest possible accuracy.

E – Examine: After reflecting, the team examines the data and identifies areas where things went well and areas ripe for improvement. This might involve using tools and techniques to gather and understand information gathered during reflection.

A – Analyze: The team digs deeper to analyze the root causes of both successes and challenges. This might involve asking “why” questions to try and determine the root cause of problems we might be experiencing.

L – Learn: One of the goals of a retrospective is to learn from past iterations. This involves identifying actionable takeaways that can be implemented in succeeding iterations to improve the team’s process and product.

Benefits of REAL Retrospectives

We enable REAL retrospectives by focusing on retelling the story of how an iteration proceeded and using this information to develop a narrative on improvement. Stay tuned as we introduce some new and time-tested techniques that will enable a renaissance of retrospectives and fresh look at how teams and organizations can get on track to high performance.

Contact us today to discuss how agile ideas and practices can help your organization improve.