Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great

by Esther Derby

Creating a structured way for people to talk about feelings makes it more comfortable to raise topics that have an emotional charge. When people avoid emotional content, it doesn’t go away; it goes underground and saps energy and motivation. Or the emotion may come out in a flare of anger, and a flame war won’t help your retrospective.

Without a shared picture, people are working from a narrow set of data—their own. When people look only at their own data, the team is less likely to commit to changes and experiments. Without feelings data, the team may not address the topics that are most important to them.