Facilitation · 45-90 minute sessions

The Retrospective Starfish

The Retrospective Starfish is a visual reflection framework designed to help teams evaluate their practices with greater nuance than traditional binary models. By categorizing feedback into five distinct areas, it encourages participants to identify specific actions for continuous improvement and project health assessment.

When to use The Retrospective Starfish

Most effective during project debriefs or sprint retrospectives when a team needs to move beyond simple 'good vs. bad' lists and requires a more sophisticated view of process refinement.

How The Retrospective Starfish works

Facilitators can integrate this by drawing a five-pointed star on a whiteboard or digital canvas. Participants contribute observations to each segment, creating a 'scattergram' that visualizes team sentiment and highlights areas where the team should shift their energy or resources.

Phases of The Retrospective Starfish

  1. Keep Doing: Practices that work well and the team wants to continue as they are. Participants write sticky notes for this arm of the starfish drawing.
  2. Less Of: Practices that still add some value but take too much time or energy. The team names what to reduce rather than drop.
  3. More Of: Practices that add value and deserve more investment. Participants suggest what to scale up or do more often.
  4. Stop Doing: Practices that no longer add value or cause harm and should be dropped. The facilitator keeps the discussion on practices, not people.
  5. Start Doing: New ideas or practices the team wants to try. After clustering and discussing all five areas, the team picks a few concrete actions with owners.

Key principles

  • Nuanced Reflection: Moving beyond black-and-white thinking to identify degrees of change.
  • Action-Oriented Feedback: Coercing participants into suggesting concrete changes rather than just venting.
  • Visual Health Assessment: Using the distribution of points across the starfish to estimate the overall health of a project.
  • Dynamic Evolution: Encouraging the introduction of new ideas (Start Doing) while pruning non-value-adding tasks (Stop Doing).

Best for

  • Agile retrospectives
  • Team process improvement
  • Post-project reviews
  • Organizational health checks

Considerations

  • Requires a facilitator to ensure 'Less Of' and 'More Of' don't become redundant.
  • Works best when participants are encouraged to think about specific roles, technologies, and techniques.
  • For distributed teams, digital whiteboarding tools are necessary to maintain the visual 'scattergram' effect.

Attribution & sources

Developed by Patrick Kua, 2006

Primary source

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