This is retrospective facilitation

A 5 minute reflection on retrospective topics. https://thisisretrospectivefacilitation.com/episodes/reflection-on-voting-in-retrospectives

The retrospective facilitators gathering (RFG) is an annual open space conference--started in 2002--where we discuss retrospective facilitation techniques and everything that connects to it. Why would you spend one week on a conference dedicated to retrospective facilitation? I attended this year's (2019) and in this episode I chat with 4 others attendees and we will tell you what we got out of it.

In this episode I have three guests and they collaborated in facilitating a retrospective for multiple teams for a total of 60 people. As you might expect they split the groups and used nested diamonds of participatory decision making (from Kaner’s book). They wrote a detailed blog post https://www.agile42.com/en/blog/2018/09/05/how-we-facilitated-all-hands-retrospective-60-people-three-hours/ but I wanted to ask a few more questions. Why would you embark on such an endeavor, what did they learn and what recommendations they have for facilitators about to handle a group this large

Do you ever find your retrospectives only handle business as usual items? It can do more then that and our guest today is Adam Light which for the last 5 years has been using Toyota Kata concepts to achieve that.

https://thisisretrospectivefacilitation.com/episodes/beyond-retrospectives-using-toyota-learning-kata

Why do we need a book about retrospectives? In this episode Pat tells us about the book he wrote about retrospective facilitation and share some insights from his experience.

In this episode I chat with Dan Greene. He was an F18 Navy pilot for 10 years and then started working in the tech industry for companies like Twitter and Google. He tells us his experience with debriefings and a culture of feedback that starts with Navy training. Then I ask him how the debriefing concept translated to his career outside the military.

Music used in intro/outro is by Krakatoa https://krackatoa.bandcamp.com/album/running-with-wise-fools

In this episode Jon Schneider a fellow Pivot working on the Java Spring team tells us about action items generated during after action review (AAR) in a war zone. He tells us how tactical cycles constantly changes and how the teams collaborated and used ingenuity to adapt and circumvent situations--only apparently--outside their control.

Music used in intro/outro is by Krakatoa https://krackatoa.bandcamp.com/album/running-with-wise-fools

We often skip retrospectives in our practices. What happens when you skip a debriefing in a war-zone? In this episode we interview a USMC war veteran and reflect about similarities between retrospectives and military debriefings.

Music used in intro/outro is by Krakatoa https://krackatoa.bandcamp.com/album/running-with-wise-fools

Does your retrospective only tackle low hanging fruit? What about the harder issues? In this episode we’ll hear Joanne's approach using double loop learning.

Music used in intro/outro is by Krakatoa https://krackatoa.bandcamp.com/album/running-with-wise-fools

What’s the end goal of a retrospective? I am gonna give you a little spoiler the answer is not to put stuff in three columns and fix all the sad items. But today we’ll hear George Dinwittie’s answer.

Music used in intro/outro is by Krakatoa https://krackatoa.bandcamp.com/album/running-with-wise-fools