Retrospectives are the key event for ensuring continuous improvement in agile and non-agile teams. However, many participants tend to have bad experiences with poorly facilitated retrospectives, which demotivates them from sharing personal insights and, in the end, might lead to a cancelling of retrospectives from the team’s schedule. There are many books and articles about how a good retrospective looks like. They describe the result but often they lack the crucial part of HOW to get to engaging and sustainable retrospective. It is unfortunately not sufficient to simply combine different formats for each of the five retrospective stages from template collections (like e.g. the retromat) – there is more to that. In this talk I will share my visual template for designing flowing retrospectives and I will guide the participants through my intention of each of the designing steps. Among others the participants will learn:

•  Why it is important to change between focus topics in retrospectives
•  How important a clear retrospective goal is for the design
• Why to not start with the Set-the-Stage phase when designing a retrospective
• With which phase to start instead
• What the prerequisit informations for a successful retrospective design are
• How to smoothly connect the different phases of the retrospective
• How to increase your (short- and long-term) success of retrospectives
• What to do if things don’t work out as planned

This talk is perfect for all those who have the feeling that there is still some room for improvement in their retrospectives and/ or their retrospective design.