12 Steps to Running a Sprint Retrospective Like a Pro: Step 11

by Scrum Alliance, John McFadyen

Join Certified Scrum Trainer® John McFadyen for a 12-part video series exploring the scrum event known as the sprint retrospective. Throughout the series, he’ll share tips and tricks for creating impactful, engaging, and effective sprint retrospectives for your teams.

For tip number 11, we’re going to apply the concept of divergent and convergent thinking to sprint retrospectives. Divergent thinking is about exploring a space, opening up to ideas and brainstorming all of the possible topics to discuss. Convergent thinking is narrowing down those big ideas to what the team actually wants to talk about.

You can think about divergent and convergent thinking as an exercise in expanding and contracting. You begin on a large scale with a wide range of possibilities, and then you contract into a small scale, with a narrow list of actionable items.

Divergent and convergent thinking is vital for exploring the large range of possibilities, while keeping things focused at the same time.

One way to go from convergent to divergent thinking is by using the dot voting technique. When you have a lot of ideas, each team member gets a dot sticker or uses a marker to get three votes on their favorite ideas. This can also be done virtually using any collaboration tool to mimic the in-person version.

McFayden shares how, as a scrum master, it was easy to generate a lot of action items, and he was excited when the team walked away with 17 actions in one sprint! However, none of them would actually get done, so the team wasn’t seeing any improvement.

The next time you’re facilitating a retrospective, take the team through this flow and give them space to diverge and explore, and then converge into a small list of actionable improvements to propel the team forward.

Key Takeaways:

Divergent thinking is opening up the space for big ideas and possibilities.
Convergent thinking is contracting ideas to small, actionable items.
By using both convergent and divergent thinking during a retrospective, you can set your team up for success.

Need to watch any of the other videos in the series? Find the links below!

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Presenter(s)

Scrum Alliance

John McFadyen

John McFadyen is an Executive and Enterprise Agile Coach with proven experience working on some of the UK and Europe’s largest, most complex Agile Transformations. As a Certified Scrum Trainer, John brings a wealth of experience as an Agile coach, Agile practitioner and software developer into each of the 4 core courses he provides. Certified ScrumMaster Certified Scrum Product Owner Advanced Certified ScrumMaster Certified Scrum Professional ScrumMaster The war stories, the insights into successful Agile transformations and everything he has learned from coaching high-performance Agile teams combines to provide course delegates with a unique, compelling training experience that transforms as much as it empowers. John is passionate about cultivating high-performing Agile organisations that unleash people’s passion and creativity. As an Agile coach, John has worked with C-Suite level individuals on cultivating and embedding Business Agility within the DNA or large organisations. In addition to being an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, John is also a founding partner of Agile Centre. As an entrepreneur, John works at growing Agile capability with clients from around the world. Agile Centre has fast established itself as a pioneer in the cultivation and development of Agile capabilities within organisations great and small. John leverages his experience as an Agile coach, consultant and trainer to help organisations embed Agile values, mindsets and develop a high-performance culture of Business Agility. John is also deeply invested in growing the next generation of great Scrum Masters via the Agile Coaching Academy. An 18-month journey that helps practitioners move through an apprenticeship in Agile coaching through to journeyman and practising Agile coach. John is also an international keynote speaker, author and Business Agility mentor. Visit www.johnmcfadyen.com for more insights into John’s writing, thought leadership and mentorship.