Five stages (Derby & Larsen)
- Set the stage — establish psychological safety. State the prime directive: regardless of what we discover, we assume everyone did the best they could.
- Gather data — facts about what happened. Timeline, metrics, incidents. Not opinions yet.
- Generate insights — patterns. Why did the data look that way? What systemic forces produced this?
- Decide what to do — concrete actions, with owners. 1–3 changes max — more is wishful.
- Close — appreciation, signal of meeting end.
The prime directive
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
— Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives
Read aloud at the start of every retro. It's not soft — it's structural. Without it, retros become fault-finding, which produces no actionable change because the same dynamic recurs with different people.
The McConnell warning
McConnell (Rapid Development) names the most common retro failure: blaming people instead of systems. The good retro question isn't "who failed?" — it's "what would we change in our process so the same thing doesn't happen again, regardless of who's on the next team?"
↳ format variety matters
Same format every sprint = stale retros. Rotate: Mad/Sad/Glad, Start/Stop/Continue, the 4Ls (Liked/Learned/Lacked/Longed-for), Sailboat (wind/anchors). Variety keeps the team engaged and surfaces different patterns.