Agile Retrospectives are important in building high-performance teams. The key part is that entire team needs to go in with an open mind for the purpose of learning and improving. As a scrum master/team lead, my role, was to get everyone engaged and participate. Having moved from years of waterfall to scrum, at our very first newly minted team retrospective there was really a lot of consternation and skepticism and a whole lot of silence. It almost seem like I needed a retrospective about the retrospective, in fact, I did one myself.
We had jumped into the retrospective, following the script we had got from scrum training, which is on a white board, write and discuss what to start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. however, teams new to scrum, and to each other, seldom dive in and start talking. Needless to say, it was not a very productive retrospective, so ahead of the 2nd retrospective, did some research into fun retrospective games and sought ideas from the team.
We started, the second retrospective by going around the room and having everyone say how the person to the left of them had helped them with during the sprint. That brought some suprising insights and we then went on to,
Needless to say this retrospective went much better. Subsequently we have tried different retrospective games, however starting with an appreciation first always worked best.
