Making Retrospectives Better

I heard a great suggestion today at work on the topic of Retrospectives, those reflect-and-adapt opportunities that usually go hand-in-hand with embracing Agile principles in your workplace. One of the issues we've had to deal with in holding Retrospectives is that some of the attendees don't always buy into many of the activities that the organizer plans, for whatever reason (personal biases, past history with a poorly-executed example of that activity, poor job explaining it by the facilitator).

The excellent suggestion was to try an approach where you determine a set of possible activities and then let the team members vote ahead of time on which ones they'd like to use. This obviously assumes the team members/participants know enough about the activities to make a choice, so probably applies more to situations where a group is doing their 4th, 5th, ... Retrospective as a group, rather than their first few. Personally I love the idea of getting people more involved in that way, since it helps break them out of thinking like it's the facilitator's Retrospective and more in tune with it being theirs.

I'll admit, sometimes it's the little things that catch my attention.