Workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives
2023-02-09 | Online, Netherlands
Learn how you can facilitate retrospectives, practice exercises that involve everyone, and gain insight into psychological safety in retrospectives in the online workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives on February 9, 2023.
A one-day interactive workshop for €450.

Facilitating Retrospectives
Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve by reflecting at the end of each iteration to learn what is going well and what can be improved, and to do improvement actions in the next iteration. Retrospective facilitators need to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises and the skills to design and lead valuable agile retrospectives.
Facilitating retrospectives can be hard. As a facilitator you need to:

Set the stage where people get into a reflection and learning mode
Do exercises that get people involved and bring out issues that the team wants to work on
Establish psychological safety for people to be open about what bothers them
Recognize and deal with retrospective smells or anti-patterns when they happen
Guide the team to come up with their vital few actions to make change happen

Remote retrospectives pose extra challenges due to not having people in one physical room for the retrospective:

It’s more difficult to foster productive and collaborative behavior and keep everyone involved during the meeting
Not physically being together calls for different retrospective exercises or innovative ways to do exercises online
Establishing psychological safety when people collaborate remotely is essential, but can be hard to do

In the workshop Facilitating Effective Retrospectives, we will practice leading retrospectives while fostering psychological safety using exercises that keep people involved.
Audience
This workshop is intended for:

Retrospective Facilitators
Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
Agile Teams
Agile and Lean Coaches
Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
Anybody who is involved in agile retrospectives

The practices in this workshop will help you to get more value from doing (remote) agile retrospectives.
Results
What will you get out of this workshop:

Explore unproductive behavior in retrospectives and learn to recognize retrospective smells or anti-patterns
Develop your facilitation skills for leading retrospectives
Practice different exercises for in-person and distributed retrospectives using online tools
Learn about psychological safety in retrospectives and what can be done to keep people involved

Practical information
Four-hour interactive online live workshop.
You can book this workshop by buying a ticket or by contacting me by email at benlinders@gmail.com.
There’s no minimum number of attendees, this workshop will be held even if only one person signs up. Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can participate in exercises and play the games to be fully involved and engaged.
Cancelations are allowed until two weeks before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.
All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the ebook Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Bingo, and a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Smells Cards. (value €30).

Testimonials
The below testimonials come from the many workshops on agile retrospectives that I have done over the years.
“The workshop presented in a clear way why retrospectives are the driving force to an organization which wants to improve. Using some playful exercises I learned several easy ways to extract the current status of the team and how to decide which should be the next steps to address potential problems and risks”
Nikolaos Raptis – Scrum Master – Software Developer at Scytl Secure Electronic Voting
“I got a better understanding of retrospectives and many ideas on how to use them in my work. I can suggest this workshop to anyone that wants to go agile. Also thanks for the reading material, I found it very helpful.”
Bill Souliotis – Manager Software Research & Development Graphics User Interface at BETA CAE Systems
“After working together for many years, our team (myself included) grew out of the need for formal retrospectives. This workshop helped to get some fresh ideas that can refuel our retros and stressed some key points about the necessity and importance of facilitation in these events.”
Yorgos Saslis – Solution Design Executive at CytechMobile.com
“I’d like to thank you again for your excellent workshop. It was fun and I already started using some of the ideas with my team. The change is definitely notable.”
Liran Ben-Porat, qSpark LTD
“Thanks once again for a wonderful workshop! We have a lot of useful outputs which we are going to implement. And thanks for the free copy of your book about the retrospectives, now we are able to go through the topics once again and do the exercises in our company.”
Jakub Grós, Project Engineer at Honeywell
“I found the workshop very useful. We’ve already started to experiment with some action items we gave ourselves in the workshop, doing changes in our overall retrospective approach. We are also trying out cross facilitation, having our retrospectives facilitated by a Scrum master of another team.”
Simona Humpolová, Scrum master at EmbedIT
I have taken some of my Scrum masters to Ben’s retrospective training. I like the training very much, and also his website which contains many retro techniques. I still use this as a reference when I coach people.
Zoltán Ludányi, Agile Software Development Consultant
Learning by practicing and experiencing
Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.
I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.
My approach enables attendees to apply the things they learned in their daily work.
The workshops are time well spent; organizations get value for their money!
