Every day in every way I am getting better and better.

Cheesy? Yes it is! I think a couple of people smiled today when I said that at our first whole-team retrospective. Which was the goal. Sacrifice myself on the altar of bad humor, that's me.

The development team has been digging our weekly, informal retrospectives: what went well, what didn't, what should we do more of, what should we do differently. It's fun! We do better, smarter work. What's not to love?

So we thought we'd expand it outward to the next ring - management, product, infrastructure, design. 

I appreciate the honesty and courage of my coworkers. Today's retrospective was a great beginning. 

Invited everyone a week ago. 

Cleared off a whiteboard. 

The team decided to send two devs so as not to overwhelm the group with a majority.

Printed and posted the meeting's outline based on...

Actual: Pretty much the same.

Check-in - 1min 

Planned: Everyone gave two words about how they were feeling about the prospect of the retrospective.
Actual: Some phrases slipped in =)

Assumptions - 5min

Planned: Tell the team: “Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better.” 

Actual: Pained grins

- We did the best we could with what we had. 
- We gain peace of mind by putting aside what we could or should have done and by accepting who and where we are right now. 
- We seek to solve problems, not assign blame. 
Actual: Nods all around. Note to self, add this to the working agreements so they can be changed by the team over time.

Create Working Agreements – 15min

Planned: Based on the goal of "Establish a set of behaviors that will support us in having productive discussions." each person in the group writes up stickies (e.g. post-its) with their ideas about what that meant.
Actual: A lot of people suggested values, like Openness, Transparency, Honesty. A few behaviors were suggested, and I attempted to elicit more. All was captured. One behavior in particular was "Establish a goal for each retrospective." We did that, setting the stage for the next activity.

An explanation of mad, sad, glad. We modified slightly.

- Create color-coded stickies - 5 
- Group stickies by emergent theme – 5 
- Pick, analyze, problem solve – 10/per
Actual:

- Create color-coded stickies - 5 
- Group stickies by emergent theme – 10

- Pick, analyze one group until we ran out of time

Actual: Team members stepping up to point out that we'd used up all of our time discussing one group of issues with no conclusions and a need to finish. Then amongst the group there was... 

- Realizing there was a lot more to talk about

- Some hesitation and attempt to come to some hasty conclusions

- Pausing

- Deciding to park open issues and meet early the next morning because the conversation that was begun was critical to the project

We also added a working agreement to schedule time for the next retro and any other working-groups or meetings that were spawned during the discussion.

I think I'll start tomorrow's retrospective with a mini-retro of the retro itself. I can already think of a couple things I'd like to do next time... but I'll leave that to the team to decide.