Retrospectives shouldn’t suck the energy out of your team—or get skipped entirely. In this episode, Brian and Cort share how to fix the most common retro fails and announce two brand-new tools to help you run retros that actually work.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Cort Sharp break down why retrospectives are more than just a “Scrum box to check.” They’re the powerhouse behind continuous team improvement. From battling retro fatigue and quiet-room energy to creating psychologically safe environments and tying retrospectives to real results, they cover it all.

Plus, Brian reveals the launch of two new on-demand courses—Better Retrospectives and The Retrospectives Repair Guide—designed to help teams stop skipping and start optimizing their retros. Whether you're a Scrum Master, coach, or facilitator, this episode is your practical guide to making retrospectives worth everyone’s time again.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Cort Sharp

Blog: Retrospectives With a Quiet Team

Blog: Does a Scrum Team Need a Retrospective Every Sprint

Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course

Scrum Repair Guide

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Cort Sharp is the Scrum Master of the producing team and the Agile Mentors Community Manager. In addition to his love for Agile, Cort is also a serious swimmer and has been coaching swimmers for five years.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00 )

Welcome in Agile Mentors. Welcome back for another episode of Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner, but today we're gonna have a continuation of something we tried, a little experiment we tried a few weeks back here. I've got Mr. Court Sharp back with us. Welcome back in court.

Cort Sharp (00:18 )

Hey, Brian, thanks for having me on again. I had lot of fun last time I was on here and it was a great discussion. So thanks for bringing me back.

Brian Milner (00:21 )

Yeah. Yeah, it's, oh, absolutely. Yeah, know, got a lot of people said, hey, we kind of like that court guy. Kind of like hearing from court. So we wanted to have court back, you know, because you guys told us that you liked him. And we also wanted to have him back because we just thought this format kind of worked for various reasons. And last time we kind of hit on some things that were kind of more hot button issues of the day. things that have been flowing through social media or other things around Agile. But we wanted to have a little bit more of a focus for today's episode. And we're going to focus really on the topic of retrospectives. And maybe make a little announcement here along the way as we go along. But we're actually going to switch roles here a little bit. I'm going to kind of pass the ball over to Court. And I'm going let Court drive this, just like he did in the last episode. Ball's in your court. Ha ha, get it?

Cort Sharp (01:18 )

Ha ha, court, there you go. Well thanks, Brian. Once again, I love coming on here, I love chatting with you. And like you said, yeah, we're gonna be talking about retrospectives today, mostly because I have been struggling with answering questions about retrospectives. I think this is one of the more common meetings within Scrum that just gets skipped over, just people don't find value in it.

Brian Milner (01:42 )

Yeah.

Cort Sharp (01:43 )

or people just struggle with understanding why we have retrospectives. And sometimes I get a little slipped up and I struggle with answering the questions about why do we do this? So can you give me some clarification? Why do we have retrospectives? Why do they matter?

Brian Milner (01:58 )

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. And I think everyone should, should, you know, want to know that answer. If you're doing this, you one of things I say in class all the time is, you know, it's important to know the purpose behind the meetings that we have in scrum. If you don't know the purpose, then, you know, that, how are we gonna, how are we gonna have a successful meeting? How are we gonna get the most out of it? so yeah, it's, it's a funny kind of meeting, because all the other meetings and scrum are, are really, around one ultimate purpose and that's building the increment. This is not, right? This is sort of a timeout. It's an intentional kind of timeout to step away and say, all right, now that we've done that, how did it go? What kind of happened along the way? I think it's a vitally important meeting. And when I hear people sometimes say, is it okay to skip it or should we do it once ever so often? you know, again, I try to be pragmatic and say, you know, I don't, I don't know any possible situation out there, but, you know, I would tell you, I would advise you not to, I don't think that's the right path to go. I know scrum doesn't teach to do that. I think it's really, really important because it is that, that moment of let's pause for a little bit. Let's figure out what we need to do differently and then let's actually take a step to do it. There's actually an interesting little background for this. So I'm going to take a little side trip here. Retrospectives actually come from an idea that has been around for a while that actually started kind of in lean manufacturing, some of the things that came out of Japan. There was actually a phrase that they would use on the assembly line at the auto assembly plants there in Japan. They referred to this concept of Kaizen. Kaizen was kind of a, I don't speak Japanese, but what I understand is the word loosely kind of translates to good change. And they had this concept there on the assembly line floor that anyone who was on the floor had access to the big red button that could stop the entire thing. They could stop the entire assembly line, which you know, on an auto assembly plant, that's a huge deal to stop the entire production. And they were very deliberate about it and said, no, we want everyone to have access to that because the phrase they use was the Kaizen comes first. And what they instructed the employees was if you along the way, as you're doing your job, if you see something that we could change that would make it more efficient, that would be a better way of doing this, then we want you to hit the red button because we want to implement whatever that change is as soon as possible. The sooner we implement the change, the longer we have as a benefit, like an investment. The earlier I invest, the more I get as a return. So the same thing here, the earlier I invest in this good change, the longer I have to have a return from it. So that phrase, the Kaizen comes first, is sort of a central thing that we think about here with retrospectives. It's identifying those good changes. there's actually even an intention behind it that it doesn't go on the product backlog. It goes in the next sprint backlog. Because we don't want to have any even inkling of deprioritizing something that comes out of a retrospective. It's that Kaizen portion. So we want to make sure that comes first. So yeah, it absolutely is going to go into the next sprint. Whatever we decide is the most important thing, we're going to make an impact on it in the next sprint. So that's why I think that it's the most important thing for us is it's the engine that really drives continual improvement. And without it, I think teams stagnate. I think they just get kind of stuck in a rut. problems that we have, we just continually repeat. if we don't have the time to stop an exam.

Cort Sharp (06:00 )

Yeah. All right. So I kind of got one bigger idea from there. And for whatever reason, when you were like, we gave everyone the red button to stop the assembly line. And that's kind of, we're stopping, we're pausing, we're inspecting, and then we're going to come up with a plan to adapt. Whatever reason, this phrase stuck in my head, it just popped out to me. But it sounds like we're giving power to the people.

Brian Milner (06:06 )

Okay.

Cort Sharp (06:26 )

where we're, you know, the team has the power, the people have the power to say, whoa, let's stop here. Let's hang on a second. Let's take some time and let's figure out a better way to move forward. And from that, I just think of sports. I think of sports teams. We're in th