Facilitating a retrospective with 50 people in an hour
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Join For FreeAs one of the volunteers at Agile 2012 I was honored to be asked to facilitate the volunteer retrospective.
There were a few constraints that made this retrospective challenging.
First, due to our volunteer responsibilities we had just under an hour
to eat lunch and complete the retrospective. Second, there are about 50
volunteers - allowing everyone to have a voice in such a short time
frame would be a challenge. Third, it was important to all of us to
celebrate the things that went well and also give a clear, prioritized
list of ideas to future volunteer teams.
After discussing the constraints and various facilitation options with some of you, here is what we did:
1. Instead of building a timeline of our experiences we held the
retrospective in our volunteer room. Throughout the week we had
plastered the walls with our schedules (including happy/sad faces),
guidelines, issues, ideas for improvement, etc which then served as
visual provocations for the retrospective.
![]() |
Picture courtesy of Adam Yuret |
3. We split into 5 groups of 10. Each group would perform a retrospective step together before sharing their results with the larger group.
4. The two major prompts we used in the retrospective were:
![]() |
The combined 'greats' |
- "Do differently". Once again, each table wrote these in silence, read them out loud to each other, and then voted in silence. The top 3 items from each table were again shared with the rest of the tables and consolidated into one larger list.
5. Finally, we posted pictures of all the results (yes, every single post-it note) on the Agile Conference Volunteers Facebook page for later reference and comments.
It was a lot of fun and seemed to work well given the constraints. We achieved our goal of giving everyone a voice in a short time period, celebrating what went well, and also producing a nice list of actionable ideas for next year. Anything you would do differently?
Published at DZone with permission of Steve Rogalsky, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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