The “Bring out your dead” Retro of Retros Activity— Ensuring teams aren’t forgotten at scale

Struggling to be heard at scale?

I’ve spent a lot of time working across scrum teams local and abroad, working to ensure we can inspect and adapt our processes at scale through retro of retros — and in doing so found a lot of challenges along the way.

Do you have a team who’s issues are being lost in the crowd?

The biggest challenge I found along that journey was the constant build-up of important themes raised that could be observed having a major impact, by a single team, but never deemed by the broader group as the priority point to discuss — seemingly lost in the crowd.

While in-line with the principles of ensuring the highest priority items are always addressed through retrospectives, what it does is create is underlying frustration for that team raising the point again and again — feeling their voice is not being heard amongst the group.

Finding a better way

To tackle this challenge, I put together a unique retrospective method that aimed at providing the team a chance to reflect on those unaddressed issues of the past — taking the attention away from their burning issues to stop and reflect on the concerns of the past briefly.

The goal was to ensure that we don’t violate the principle of self-organising teams, and find a way we can nudge the teams to think about the past.

Enter — the “Bring out your dead” retrospective activity.

The ‘Bring out your dead’ retrospective

This retrospective method focuses on looking back at commonly occurring, or highly voted themes from previous retro of retros — and re-assessing them as a team to see if those concerns still exist.

What you need?

• A collated list of previous themes from the last 3–4 retro of retros that were tabled, but never voted high enough to be discussed
• A collaboration area and pens and sticky notes (I’m a big fan of GoReflect for scaled teams, particularly remote teams

Running the activity:

• (Optional) Re-watch Monty Python’s ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’
• Draw three columns on your board labelled as follows:

Setup your board with these three columns

• Share the collated list of themes from previous sprints with each participant and explain:
  “We are here to revisit themes we’ve previously raised, checking to see if there is a key issue we need to revisit”
• Take turns introducing each theme one a time — then give the participants each one vote, and ask them to vote on the board where they believe the theme should go by marking that column:

Get team members to vote where they think this theme should be placed on the board

• Like planning poker — look for outliers, and if they exist ask that individual to explain their position and facilitate discussion, iterating through votes until the team can agree on a location for the card.

Once consensus is reached, place the card in the agreed column

• Once agreed, place the card in that column and move onto the next theme
• Once all themes have been assessed, you can now use dot voting to prioritise those items in the “Isn’t there something you can do about this?” column.
• Now apply your favourite problem solving techniques to diverge and converge (eg. 5 whys, 1–2–4-All, DAD etc.)to each card in priority order to identify and extract actions to address its room cause.
• Identify and capture actions to address that theme — remembering good actions are assigned to individuals, and are time bound.