Podcasts about retrospectives

Ever wonder what's really happening in the OKR world beyond the hype?Join Sara Lobkovich, Maria Rowcliffe, and Natalie Webb for a candid, no-BS look at where OKRs are heading in 2025. This isn't your typical "here's how to write an objective" conversation. Instead, you'll get insider insights from three veteran practitioners who've been in the trenches, helping organizations navigate the messy reality of goal-setting and alignment at scale.In this first part of our quarterly update, we dive deep into the generative AI revolution (spoiler: it's not as revolutionary as everyone claims), the evolving art of OKR localization across complex organizations, and why your retrospectives might be the most important OKR practice you might be doing wrong. Whether you're an OKR skeptic, a seasoned practitioner, or somewhere in between, this conversation will give you practical insights you can't get anywhere else.Episode Highlights:Generative AI in OKRs: why draft quality is improving, but real strategic impact is still lagging behindTRV (Technology Realized Value): the Big Five's new metric for linking OKRs to actual tech investment outcomesThe “Two Lists” Problem: how teams are secretly working off dual strategies—and why it's undermining OKR focusCascading and Localization: evolving models for aligning across global teams, even amid geopolitical complexityCulture-First OKRs: tailoring implementation to readiness, from transformation-driven overhauls to scrappy gradual rolloutsRetrospectives that matter: how deeper reflection—not just review—builds quarter-over-quarter OKR maturityKey Concepts Explored:Generative AI in OKRs: Where it's accelerating strategy work, where it's falling short, and the risk of generic, uncontextualized modelsTechnology Realized Value (TRV): A new metric used alongside OKRs to measure the tangible impact of tech investmentsThe “Two Lists” Problem: How parallel strategic workstreams outside the OKR framework dilute focus and undermine accountabilityLocalization & Alignment: Why clear, bottom-up contribution is critical in global, matrixed organizations—especially in high-stakes geopolitical climatesCulture-Responsive Implementation: Tailoring OKR rollouts based on organizational readiness, risk appetite, and transformation goalsIterative Learning over Perfection: Why OKR maturity builds quarter over quarter—and how learning from retrospectives is more valuable than writing the “perfect” OKRLeading vs. Lagging Indicators: The power of AI to help surface potential leading indicators clients may struggle to define on their ownTransformation & Change Management: How OKRs, when paired with transformation strategy, become powerful drivers of organizational evolutionNotable Quotes: "Is this really driving the value you wanted to achieve? How do you know who cares? So what happens if this is done or not done? These things that don't get asked are so critically important to make sure that people are focused on the right work." — Natalie Webb [00:12:00]"If I could only tell clients one thing about OKRs, it would be we spend all of our time focused on writing them and then way too little time focused on learning from them." — Sara Lobkovich [00:23:00]"I think the best way to use OKRs initially is always the way that the company is willing and able to adopt it. Me talking about the gold star way of doing OKRs isn't gonna help clients that are at the crawling level and not a hundred percent convinced yet." — Maria Rowcliffe [00:21:00]"OKRs are really hard. We're talking about change - really hard for people to stick with when it gets challenging." — Sara Lobkovich [00:28:00]Chapters:[00:00:00] Introduction:...

After a longer than expected Spring hiatus, The Film '89 Podcast is back and on Episode 134, returning co-hosts Matthias Van De Roest and Bill Scurry join Steve and Skye to celebrate the 40th anniversary of acclaimed director William Friedkin's 1985 crime drama To Live and Die in L.A. Something of a return to form for Friedkin after a number of critical and commercial failures, the film would tap into the same gritty police procedural approach that made his 1971 masterpiece The French Connection so successful. Starring William Petersen, John Pankow, Debra Feuer, Darlanne Fluegel, Dean Stockwell, John Turturro and featuring a brilliantly threatening turn from Willem Dafoe as counterfeiter Eric Masters, To Live and Die in L.A. also features gorgeous cinematography by Robby Müller and a stunning new wave soundtrack by Wang Chung. As well as giving their usual in-depth analysis, the guys also dig into the making of the film, paying particular attention to its incredible car chase sequence. So fasten your seatbelts and hold on tight as the Film '89 team explore one of the quintessential crime dramas of not just the 1980s, but any decade.

Dun dun dun dun....I can't do the tune. I love X-Men. So time to talk some X-Men Apocalypse with good old Richard Jago. You can follow me on the following socials: Twitter: @retrowarsuk Instagram: retro_wars_podcast Tiktok: @retrowarsuk Retro Wars is now on YouTube doing Retrospectives on a bunch of games. Subscribe here at - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjyOYGaq-DSB66GfIVqWmMA Please give the show a 5 star review to help it get shown to others. If you want to help the show financially, you can do at www.patreon.com/retrowars You get access to your own fortnightly show, DLC, our discord and can join in with all the show's features. 5% of the Patreon will go to the charity, Get Well Gamers. They are a UK charity who provides children's wards in 150 hospitals with consoles and games for the children to play. Their website can be found here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/  If you would like to donate any games you can find out how to do this here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/donate/donate-games/  Follow our artists - Slowspeed run's new channel - Doodle Lounge at https://www.youtube.com/c/SlowSpeedrun 

In this episode of the Building Better Developers podcast, co-hosts Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche dig into one of the most underused but powerful tools for business improvement: retrospectives. Whether you're a startup founder, a seasoned project manager, or a solo entrepreneur, retrospectives are essential for continuous growth and team alignment. This post captures the key takeaways from the episode and the challenge they leave for listeners at the end.

Sorry this is late everyone, it is Final Fantasy V time. Me and Chris Coplien from the Retro Hangover podcast are teaming up to take on....a tree...yes a tree. You can follow me on the following socials: Twitter: @retrowarsuk Instagram: retro_wars_podcast Tiktok: @retrowarsuk Retro Wars is now on YouTube doing Retrospectives on a bunch of games. Subscribe here at - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjyOYGaq-DSB66GfIVqWmMA Please give the show a 5 star review to help it get shown to others. If you want to help the show financially, you can do at www.patreon.com/retrowars You get access to your own fortnightly show, DLC, our discord and can join in with all the show's features. 5% of the Patreon will go to the charity, Get Well Gamers. They are a UK charity who provides children's wards in 150 hospitals with consoles and games for the children to play. Their website can be found here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/  If you would like to donate any games you can find out how to do this here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/donate/donate-games/  Subscribe to our guest at Retro Hangover at https://retrohangover.captivate.fm/  Follow our artists - Slowspeed run's new channel - Doodle Lounge at https://www.youtube.com/c/SlowSpeedrun 

Nothing says more 90s than Kid Chameleon for the Sega Mega Drive. You are going into the save the virtual world, Digimon style, where you take on new abilities to defeat your enemies. Joining me on this digital adventure is Storm Beagle from the Retrotopia podcast. Will we get out alive. You can follow me on the following socials: Twitter: @retrowarsuk Instagram: retro_wars_podcast Tiktok: @retrowarsuk Retro Wars is now on YouTube doing Retrospectives on a bunch of games. Subscribe here at - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjyOYGaq-DSB66GfIVqWmMA Please give the show a 5 star review to help it get shown to others. If you want to help the show financially, you can do at www.patreon.com/retrowars You get access to your own fortnightly show, DLC, our discord and can join in with all the show's features. 5% of the Patreon will go to the charity, Get Well Gamers. They are a UK charity who provides children's wards in 150 hospitals with consoles and games for the children to play. Their website can be found here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/  If you would like to donate any games you can find out how to do this here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/donate/donate-games/  Find Storm Beagle at Retrotopia at https://open.spotify.com/show/28A670UsEPZUszXmmMm7gA  Follow our artists - Slowspeed run's new channel - Doodle Lounge at https://www.youtube.com/c/SlowSpeedrun 

On This Weeks Episode of The Super Review Show's Career Retrospectives - Podcast Edition, the J-Man, Mike and Kyle discuss and breakdown the most recent album by Elton John and Brandi Carlile... Who Believes In Angels?Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

Learn more at TheCityLife.org

Ever played a Ys game, I hadn't until Chris Coplien from the Retro Hangover podcast asked me to play Ys. I completed it and I really enjoyed it. So much so I bought the remastered...remake on the switch earlier this year. Let's dive into a big adventure whilst we none stop swing our sword around. You can follow me on the following socials: Twitter: @retrowarsuk Instagram: retro_wars_podcast Tiktok: @retrowarsuk Retro Wars is now on YouTube doing Retrospectives on a bunch of games. Subscribe here at - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjyOYGaq-DSB66GfIVqWmMA Please give the show a 5 star review to help it get shown to others. If you want to help the show financially, you can do at www.patreon.com/retrowars You get access to your own fortnightly show, DLC, our discord and can join in with all the show's features. 5% of the Patreon will go to the charity, Get Well Gamers. They are a UK charity who provides children's wards in 150 hospitals with consoles and games for the children to play. Their website can be found here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/  If you would like to donate any games you can find out how to do this here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/donate/donate-games/  Subscribe to our guest at Retro Hangover at https://retrohangover.captivate.fm/  Follow our artists - Slowspeed run's new channel - Doodle Lounge at https://www.youtube.com/c/SlowSpeedrun 

Chris Sims: The Hidden Cost of "No Time for People Stuff" in Software Teams Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Chris Sims shares a challenging team situation involving strong personalities with conflicting opinions about how to approach their work. What began as small disagreements evolved into harmful behaviors including harsh criticisms and behind-the-back comments. As resentment grew, conflicts intensified, leading to a toxic environment that ultimately resulted in team members being dismissed. Chris highlights how the team's self-imposed belief that "we don't have time for this people-stuff" prevented them from addressing issues early. He recommends one-on-one coaching, exploring why people react as they do, using retrospectives to address latent conflicts, and explicitly discussing desired team culture with reference to the Scrum value of respect. Chris emphasizes that maintaining team health should take priority over productivity concerns, even during high-pressure situations. In this segment, we refer to the Core Protocols episode with Richard Kasperowski, and the Superchicken Paradox Ted Talk by Margaret Heffernan. Featured Book of the Week: The Elements of Scrum Chris shares his experience writing "The Elements of Scrum," a book he co-authored using Scrum principles and a story mapping approach. The process of writing the book became a significant learning experience for Chris. He also recommends "Sacred Hoops" by Phil Jackson, which explores how to manage teams of great professionals. Phil Jackson is renowned for his ability to get exceptional players to function effectively as a cohesive team, making this book particularly valuable for those managing talented individuals with strong personalities. Self-reflection Question: How might you better balance technical excellence with interpersonal dynamics in your high-performing teams? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

On This Weeks Episode of The Super Review Show's - Career Retrospectives, The J-Man, Kyle and Mike Discuss and Breakdown, the latest album by A Day To Remember, "Big Ole Album Vol. 1"Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

Richard Brenner: When Individual Performance Metrics Block Agile Transformation Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Richard shares an experience of implementing Agile methods in a large organization that initially showed promising signs with management "pull" for change. The transformation began well with cross-functional teams created through self-selection workshops. However, unexpected resistance emerged during the kick-off day, particularly from a line manager and his team. When investigating the source of this resistance, Richard discovered that the company's bonus structure was tied to individual performance metrics, fundamentally conflicting with Agile's team-oriented approach.  This insight led to developing a pilot for a team-focused performance management system. After three months, the team held a retrospective with all stakeholders, where management demonstrated remarkable leadership by empowering teams to redesign their structure when the initial setup wasn't working. This flexibility allowed even the most vocal critics to become part of the solution. Self-reflection Question: In what ways might your organization's reward structures be unintentionally blocking successful Agile adoption? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Richard Brenner: How Small Signs of Cynicism Can Destroy Agile Team Cohesion Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Richard shares a powerful story about how team dysfunction often starts with small steps. During a joint retrospective with three agile teams, Richard witnessed a moment where a team member made a cynical comment toward a manager who was attempting to participate. This revealed a damaged relationship between management and the team, creating tension that Richard initially chose to ignore. Looking back, he would now immediately address such comments and tackle the "elephant in the room." Richard explains how seemingly minor behaviors like cynicism or passive-destructive actions (such as consistently being late to stand-ups) can significantly impact team health. He recommends establishing conflict resolution protocols early and using impact feedback without judgment to address these issues before they escalate. In this segment, we refer to Lysa Adkins' conflict resolution protocol.  Self-reflection Question: What small signs of dysfunction might you be overlooking in your team that could develop into larger problems? Featured Book of the Week: Solution Focused Coaching for Agile Teams Richard recommends "Solution Focused Coaching for Agile Teams" by Ralph and Veronika. This book describes the solution-focused approach to many common situations that Agile coaches face in their work. Richard values this resource for its practical guidance on addressing challenges through a positive, solution-oriented perspective rather than dwelling on problems. [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

On This Weeks Episode of The Super Review Show's Career Retrospectives - Podcast Edition the J-Man, Kyle Q and Mike discuss and breakdown the latest release by Coheed and Cambria... Enjoy!!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

I am on still on new Daddy duty, so I shortened episode again this week. I decided to go into the backlog where myself and Raging Demon from the Kommand list podcast battled the forces of Ivan Ooze in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers - The Movie. But I ask myself, why did we even bother? Retro Wars is now on YouTube doing Retrospectives on a bunch of games. Subscribe here at - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjyOYGaq-DSB66GfIVqWmMA  You can follow me on the following socials: Twitter: @retrowarsuk Instagram: retro_wars_podcast Tiktok: @retrowarsuk   Please give the show a 5 star review to help it get shown to others. If you want to help the show financially, you can do at www.patreon.com/retrowars You get access to your own fortnightly show, DLC, our discord and can join in with all the show's features. 5% of the Patreon will go to the charity, Get Well Gamers. They are a UK charity who provides children's wards in 150 hospitals with consoles and games for the children to play. Their website can be found here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/  If you would like to donate any games you can find out how to do this here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/donate/donate-games/  Subscribe to our guest at Raging Demon at - https://open.spotify.com/show/6fsiD2iRpLwNQsuXA696s4  Follow our artists - Slowspeed run's new channel - Doodle Lounge at https://www.youtube.com/c/SlowSpeedrun 

A short one this week, as I am welcoming my son, Goten, into the world. This week myself and Dave McG are talking about Alien Syndrome for the Master System. Will we save all the crew? Should we even bother? You can follow me on the following socials: Twitter: @retrowarsuk Instagram: retro_wars_podcast Tiktok: @retrowarsuk Retro Wars is now on YouTube doing Retrospectives on a bunch of games. Subscribe here at - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjyOYGaq-DSB66GfIVqWmMA Please give the show a 5 star review to help it get shown to others. If you want to help the show financially, you can do at www.patreon.com/retrowars You get access to your own fortnightly show, DLC, our discord and can join in with all the show's features. 5% of the Patreon will go to the charity, Get Well Gamers. They are a UK charity who provides children's wards in 150 hospitals with consoles and games for the children to play. Their website can be found here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/  If you would like to donate any games you can find out how to do this here - https://getwellgamers.org.uk/donate/donate-games/  Follow our artists - Slowspeed run's new channel - Doodle Lounge at https://www.youtube.com/c/SlowSpeedrun 

It is with much regret that we come to the end of the journey that has been The Film '89 Podcast, as tonight's episode marks for the guys a peak of sorts, a culmination of the last 7 years which has all led to the film we're covering on this monumental episode. Steve, Neil and Skye are joined by a returning co-host who hasn't been on Film '89 since Episode 40, way back in November 2019, when he and Steve reviewed The Irishman, it's our good friend, Tony Sower. Tony joins us to discuss his all-time favorite film, a film that we've been threatening to cover on the podcast for the longest time. If the name of this podcast takes influence from the ‘80s and nostalgia for movies we grew up with, then this film in a way typifies that era. And if the 1980s will be remembered for particular types of film, then the high concept action film is surely one of those types, born out of a decade where excess was celebrated. That film is the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger action classic, Commando. Some frankly hyperbolic opinions are going to be put forth on tonight's episode, opinions as big as the Austrian Oak himself. Commando sees Arnie, after the fantasy heroics of Conan The Barbarian and the sci-fi horror of The Terminator, playing a more grounded, contemporary role as retired Army Commando, John Matrix. Yet there's ultimately nothing grounded when it comes to Commando, a film that takes over the top machismo to hitherto unseen levels in a film that may be the action film distilled to its purest form. We hope you've enjoyed The Film '89 Podcast, we'd love to carry on, but after a peak like Commando, there's nowhere to go but down, and we always intended to go out on a high. Adios. 

Tired of “What went well?” and “What didn’t”? Brian Milner is here to help you cook up retrospectives that actually get your team thinking, collaborating, and improving. From creative themes to actionable frameworks, this is your behind-the-scenes guide to better retros. Overview Do your retrospectives feel more “check-the-box” than game-changing? Brian Milner shares his full recipe for planning and facilitating retrospectives that actually matter. Whether your team is stuck in repetition, tuning out, or phoning it in, Brian’s step-by-step approach will show you how to bring structure, creativity, and energy back into the room. Brian walks you through the five essential components of a retrospective, including how to match formats to your team’s personality, align activities with Agile's three pillars (transparency, inspection, and adaptation), and spark meaningful change with every session. References and resources mentioned in the show: Stranger Things Retrospective Download Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby & Diana Larsen Retromat Blog: Overcoming Four Common Problems with Retrospectives by Mike Cohn Blog: Does a Scrum Team Need a Retrospective Every Sprint? By Mike Cohn #139 The Retrospective Reset with Cort Sharp Retrospectives Repair Guide Better Retrospectives Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com 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. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast, like we always do. And I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. Today we have with us, me, just me. Now, before you get frustrated with that or think we're copping out in some way, this is intentional. I wanted to have an episode to myself because and working through all this stuff around retrospectives, I thought that it might be good to take an episode here. And I kind of thought of it sort of like a cooking episode, right? Like if you watch a cooking show, you know, Gordon Ramsay show or something, they'll walk you through how they make something. And it's from start to finish. They show you the ingredients. They show you how everything's put together. And then you see this beautiful dish at the end. Well, I've often compared the way that you can format a retrospective to a little bit like a meal, because a meal has different courses in it. And a retrospective should have these themed areas or repeatable sections of it. And so I thought of it a little bit like making a meal. So I thought I'd just walk you through a little bit step by step. what I'm thinking here and how I would go about doing it. this is, you know, we're cooking up something special here. It's a kind of a recipe here that's, you know, equal parts creative and effective. It's a way to try to keep your retrospectives interesting, but also keep them to be solid and where you can have an actual outcome that comes from this. And you actually make definitive changes here with your team as a result. So there's a couple of retrospective courses that I have coming out where I go into detail about all these things, but I wanted to take an episode where I could walk you through and just have you kind of peer over my shoulder a little bit about how I might do this if I was going to create a retrospective for a team. So first starters, I think we have to understand that there is a menu to follow, right? And I kind of use this menu metaphor because one of the great things about when you go out and you have a meal at a nice restaurant is there's a repeatable pattern to it. You kind of expect that they're gonna bring you a drink first and then maybe you have, if it's a really fancy restaurant, maybe you have appetizers first or hors d'oeuvres even before appetizers, then you maybe have appetizers or not. Then you have a main course and maybe you have a salad even before the main course and then you have a a meal, and then you have some kind of a dessert afterwards, maybe even some kind of a cocktail at the end of the meal or coffee at the end of the meal. But there's sort of a pattern to it. And regardless of what restaurant you go to, you kind of repeat that same pattern. Now, I know that there's times you'll be, this is where the metaphor kind of breaks down a little bit, I get it. You may not have the same pieces every time. And what we're going to be talking about here as a retrospective pattern is that, yes, you should sort of follow the same pattern. You can't really get to, let's say, dessert. You can't just skip and go to dessert, right? You've got to go through this journey of the other sections so that you can end up at dessert and really fully appreciate it, right, and get the most out of it. So that's where this metaphor is a little bit of a, starts to break down a little tiny bit. But. I want to talk about here first why retrospectives matter and why they often go stale. I think they often go stale for a lot of reasons, but one of the chief reasons I've encountered when I work with teams is that the Scrum Master on the team really only has a small amount of formats and styles that they have to work with. They have a small little set in their toolbox. And they may even rotate through a few of them. But at the end of the day, it's kind of a small toolbox. There's only a few tools in there. And if I'm a team, if I'm a member of that team, you can imagine how I might get bored. And I might think this is not really worthwhile if I'm showing up every single time and I'm hearing the same exact questions. What did I do? What do we do well? What do we not do so well? Do I have any roadblocks? If I'm just asked that same thing every time, then I might not feel like this is a very worthwhile thing. Or I might get to the point where I feel like, gosh, I've answered the same question, you know, three sprints in a row. I just, got nothing more for you Scrum Master. I just, I can't dig any deeper. I've given you everything and it just feels like this is the, you know, groundhog day. We're doing the same thing over and over again, but nothing's really changing. So. I think it's important that we be able to switch things up, but it's not change just for change sake. That's why I think that having a structure of some kind can give you that pattern to fall back on that can make it effective, but then also can provide variety, can make it something that changes over time as you do this with your team. Doesn't mean that you can't ever repeat a format that you've used. I don't think that's a bad thing. I just wouldn't want to repeat the same, just handful, small little number of them over and over again. That's going to get repetitive and it's going to make people a little frustrated. The other thing is I think you have to match these to the personality of your team. Your team might be more outgoing or they might be more introverted. You might have people who prefer activities or little more, you know, kind of quiet activities or some that are more verbal, you know, require more discussion. That's really an individual thing for your team. So I think you have to think as you go through this, what's going to work for these people, right? For this set of individuals that I am working with. You know, I always say there's kind of a first commandment for Scrum Masters, know thy team. And I think that's really something that's important for us to grasp onto is we have to know our team. can't coach to the average. Right? We have to coach to the individual, to what we have on our team, because your team is unique. That set of individuals has never come together anywhere else in the world. Right? Those personalities. And what you want is to find out how to make that set of people work well together. Right? How do they work best together? Not how does every other team in the world work best or how does the average team work best? How does your team work best? Right? So with all of this is sort of setting this and saying that there should be a pattern. I do want to give the hat tip here and say that the Esther Derby Dinah Larson book on retrospectives is one I strongly recommend. In fact, pretty much my whole career as a trainer, I have said, when people say if there's one book, if I'm to be a Scrum Master, if there's one book that you would say would be really impactful to me from pretty much day one, I have pointed to that book. It's called Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby, Dinah Larson. And in that book, they lay out a pattern of kind of five phases that go through it. I'm going to distill it down because to me, it's sort of the three middle ones that are the most important. I will talk about the two on the ends here as well and kind of put that on top of these three. But sometimes I find people find it easier if they just remember what I'm gonna teach you here about the three that are in the middle. So in Scrum Master classes, we will talk often about how there's these three pillars of the Agile process or three pillars of empiricism. Empiricism says that we learn through experience. Well, I always say in class, it's not enough to just do the wrong thing over and over again. I gain a lot of experience by doing the wrong thing over and over, but I don't learn from it. And the three pillars are what's needed to make sure you learn from them. And I'm sure you've heard these before, but if you haven't, transparency, inspection, adaptation. Those are the three. Transparency meaning we're not going to be clouded about how we do the work. We're going to be very transparent, open about it. We're going to try to reveal how we work best as much as possible. Inspection, that we're going to actually take time and pause and try to figure out not just what happened, that would be transparency, right? What's the reality of what just happened? But inspecting says, why did this happen? Right? What's the root cause of it? I don't want to just deal with the symptoms, right? If we just try to cure the symptoms over and over again, we still have the same disease, we still have the same illness, and we're not really getting to the root cause. So inspection says, we're going to take time out to actually get to the root cause. And then adaptation, the last one, is probably the most important step here, because if you figure out what's wrong, but you don't ever do anything about it, well, we're doomed to have the same exact discussion again. So adaptation says, now that you know what the problem is, what are you going to try different? We may not even know exactly what the right thing to do is, but we got to try something. What we know for certain is what we did didn't work. That's the one thing we absolutely can't do again, is exactly what we did. We've got to try something new so that we move on, right? So that we find out more information and get closer to whatever our final solution is. So transparency, inspection, adaptation, those three actually serve as a good guideline or three phases you can think about for your retrospectives. There needs to be a transparency phase where you try to figure out what happened this last sprint. there needs to be an inspection phase where now that we know what happened, we got to ask the question, why did it happen? And we need to get to the root cause of why it happened. Now that we know what that is, then we have to move on to adaptation to say, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to take this knowledge we just gained and actually make a change? So we need activities around all three. And what I'm saying here to you is that can serve as your menu. I can do lots of different activities that would match these three areas. Now, I do, again, want to go back to the Esther Derby, Dinah Larson book, because their five phases adds one on the beginning, one on the end, which I actually do think are very helpful. The first one is kind of opening the retrospective. It's a way of trying to just start to get voices in the room. And this is something I will often do as well. Just a quick, quick exercise to just get people to start talking. And that's one of the ways you can start to get a quieter group to get involved is throw them something really easy to respond to right out of the gate. And then the last one is to close the retrospective. Closing the retrospective is a great way to then try to sum it all up and say, well, here's the takeaways, here's the things we're going to do about it, and we're going to move forward from here. Opening the retrospective to that introduction can also then review what you talked about at the end of the last. retrospective. You can say, here are the things that we decided, and let's talk about what's been done about them before you start to inspect the current retrospective. So given that, right, I know I'm going fast here, but you can rewind and listen back to this if you need to. But if you think about that, that you have these kind of phased approaches, and think of it like a menu, right? There's different courses to my menu. Well, I'm not going to serve the same meal every time. That would be boring. So I got to find out different things I can serve for each course of my retrospective. Now, here's where it gets interesting, right? Because there are lots of tools out there. And there's a website that I often recommend called RetroMAT. RetroMAT is a great site where you can go to, and it has those five phases. You can kind of scroll through different exercises for each of the five phases. they sort of have, you you can kind of mix and match and create your own menu based off of that. And doing that is absolutely free. Now they have paid things there as well. They're not a sponsor. I don't get any kickbacks or anything from them. But they have some paid activities as well as far as having things like Mural and Miro templates that you can use if you want to do that as well. So there's lots of things you can do there to thank them for what they put together. But there are times when Maybe you're trying to fit this to your team specifically, or you've grown tired of the exercises that you're used to, and you want to find some new dynamic to add into your retrospective. So what I'm going to do is kind of walk you through what I would do if I wanted to take some kind of a theme and create a new retrospective that's themed around a certain topic. Now I will say that this theme is gonna go just in one of our sections. So it's not going to go throughout it. I'm not gonna be that creative here with you on it, because I don't think you need to be. I don't think you need to have this, it's not like a theme to party, right? You can just take the theme and use it in one of the sections. So what would I do for something like this? Well, I'd start with, as I said, some way to kind of open the retrospective. And I like to have little quick activities as I said, that just get voices in the room. an example of things I've done in the past. Ask the team a quick question like, if this last sprint were a song title, what song title would you use to describe this last sprint? And people can use whatever kind of music they like, right? It doesn't matter. They can just call it any songs that they're familiar with. Or do movie titles. I've had a lot of fun in the past doing that with teams where I'll say, hey, shout out a movie title that might represent this last sprint. You just want to find something quick that people can shout out like one or two word answers, right? Or a small sentence in the case of a song title or movie title or something like that. But something that they can tie it into, right? And it doesn't have to be anything that makes perfect sense, right? It can be kind of crazy. It can be... You know, if this last sprint were a flavor of Starburst or, you know, an color, what color would it be and why? And just have people, you know, shout out whatever they think the answer would be. They might have to be a little creative with their answers when they do that. But that's okay. You're just giving them an opportunity to have a few voices start to enter the conversation. Don't force anyone, right? Don't force anyone to shout out, but give them an opportunity to. So I'm going to open the retrospective with some kind of fun, quick exercise like that. Probably won't take more than five minutes, okay? Then I want to move into that transparency section. And the way I frame transparency is what actually happened this last sprint? What was the reality of what happened this last sprint? So here's where I'm going to inject a themed kind of approach. And I just, I go through a couple of examples in our courses where I talk about doing this, but I picked a different one here for this podcast episode that I've put together right before this recording to try to walk you through a little bit of how I did this. So I tried to pick something that was a little more relevant to today. I know that this is popular and people are looking forward to the next season, which is about to come out. sometime soon, I know they've been shooting it, but I picked the theme, Stranger Things. And I just thought, what if my team, you know, had, I knew there were some people on my team really into Stranger Things, or what if I just knew they were aware of it, they knew what it was, and I wanted to have a theme built around this. So here's how easy it is to do this. I went to chat GPT, and I asked it to give me some, you know, putting together a retrospective that I want to theme it around stranger things. And give me some major themes from Stranger Things that might align to Some different ways of collecting information around what actually happened this last sprint. And. They gave me a long list of different things. And I read through these and kind of tweaked them, talked back and forth with it a little bit, kind of refined. And I distilled it down to five sort of themes or categories I thought would be fun and would kind of challenge the group to think along different lines of thought. So here's what I came up with with Chat GPT's help. My first category. I called running up that hill. And what I put for the prompt for this one is what felt like an uphill battle this sprint? Now just think about that, right? In traditional sprints, there's lots of things that are just, I'm essentially asking what was the obstacles? What were the hurdles in this sprint? But I'm getting them to think about it in little different way by saying, what was an uphill battle in this sprint? And even that subtle rewording, of that prompt can trigger people's brains to work in a different way and get them to think along different lines. If I just ask over and over again, you know, what was a blocker of this sprint or what blockers do we encounter this sprint? If I use those same words over and over, I get sort of immunized against them and I can't really think about anything new. But just phrasing it that little slightly different way, what felt like an uphill battle this sprint I think can really trigger some new ways of thinking. So that was my first category. The second one that I came up with, big theme here in Stranger Things, was the upside down. And I related it this way to say, what is completely upside down right now? What is the opposite of what it should be right now? Now here, I'm trying to get them to think about things that are not really going well, right? Things that are going the opposite direction that they should, and it's upside down from what should be the normal. Right? And again, we're just thinking along this theme of stranger things and I'm tricking their brains a little bit into thinking along a different line, right? To examine it from a different point of view. My third category that I thought would be fun was I titled Vecna's Curse. And what I prompted here for this one was what haunted the team this sprint or kept coming back up to bite us. And The idea here is to get them to think about things that were maybe decisions we wish we had made differently. These could have been decisions in the past. It didn't have to be a decision from this sprint. But what are those things that we felt kind of like was like Vecna's curse? It was just something that kept rearing its ugly head. And it was just a struggle for us to get around. My fourth one, just to have a little fun. I call the fourth one Surfer Boy Pizza. And what I put as a prompt on this one was, where did we bring the chill? Where did we bring the creative spin to a tough solution during the sprint? So here I'm wanting to celebrate good things, right? And I'm asking that in a funny way. So it brings some humor to it, puts them in a better mood, and also gets them to think along a maybe a little bit of a different line in this area to think, all right, well, what do we get really creative about? What do we have to be really creative about in this sprint? What kind of tough solutions did we really conquer? Did we really nail in this sprint? And I'm just theming around that loose theme of that surfer boy pizza from the last season. And then the last one, I couldn't have categories here without mentioning Hellfire Club. So the last one was Hellfire Club. And the prompt I put for it was, where could we bring more of kind of that Hellfire Club vibe, planning, teamwork, shared adventure, right? Just the fun. Where could we put more of that vibe into our team and to how we operate? Now, this is getting them to think about something that might otherwise be a little bit of a uncomfortable thing to think about, right? Because Now we're getting into interpersonal dynamics. We're getting into how the team actually works and fits together. And that's why I chose this theme, because I wanted it to be just kind of a, even maybe a sneaky back doorway of getting their brains to start to examine, yeah, what would have made this more fun? Or what would have made this, how could we have, I've asked often in retrospectives, what would it take for us to be the team that everyone else wishes they were on? Well, That's what I'm asking here, essentially. So I've got my five themes. And I even then went forward and created and kind of get some images for each one of those, like icons for each one of those things. Just created a board and mural for this and put each of those things up. Had a big block space next to each one where people could put Post-it notes. So what I would do here in the retrospective is I'd introduce this. I'd give them the prompts for each of the section and say, all right, let's take a few minutes. Everyone can add Post-its to any of these sections, but try to think through several of them and put several of them up here on the screen or physical board if we're in the same space. But take a few moments here to think through each category and see if there's anything that you can think of that you would add to each area. So we take, I don't know, five, 10 minutes to do that. normally time that, I just see when it starts to slow down. And there's generally a point there where you can kind of intuitively feel it and feel like, you know, the group's ready to move on. So whenever that time comes, I'll call a halt to it and I'll say, all right, now that we've done this, I want us to try to narrow down what's on the board. So let's give you each three votes. And I do this usually with dot voting or something along that line. where they have three dots they can place on three different sticky notes across all five categories. And what I tell them is find the three that are the most important of all the things here, what are the three that are most important and put your vote on those top three. And by doing this, having the team vote on it, then we surface the most important three out of the entire group, right? It's not to say we ignore the others, but we're going to try, we can't focus on everything in our time that we have. So, whether our top three, and then I start with the first one, right? So right now, all we've done is kind of the introduction of the sprint. We've done a transparency section. Now we move into the inspection. Now there's lots of different things you can do here, but what I put together for this retrospective was taking them through sort of a five whys activity. So I would take that first one, I'd have them examine it and look at it and say, all right, let's ask the question why five times for this one. Why did this happen? whatever they answer, then we say, all right, well, why did that happen then? And we ask why, it doesn't have to technically be five times, but you need to ask it enough to where you get down to something that you can say, yeah, that's definitely the root cause, right? That's what's underneath all this. All that followed it, all that came afterwards was all stuff that came as a result of us making that decision. So once we have our root cause, we can repeat that again for the other two. if we have time, but if we're starting to run out of time, I kind of watch my time box there. And once I realize we need to move into solutioning, then we'll move on into the adaptation portion. In adaptation, we just take each single one, and we kind of repeat this process of getting possible answers across the team. So for the number one issue that you guys identified, here's our root cause. Let's take some post-its here. or let's take some suggestions of what we might possibly do to counteract this in the next sprint. So we get those things that come up. Then we'll talk through each one, and we'll try to build consensus as a team as to the most important step to take. So for each item, I want what's the one most important thing to do. So we'll identify that, again, as time allows, I want to at least do the most important thing. If we have time for more than that, great, we'll get to the second and third. But I think it's so important to just, whatever the biggest, most important thing is, make sure you have an action item for that thing. And here's where I just caution you. It doesn't have to be, hey, we've knocked it out. We've cleared it. We've solved it in the next sprint. It just has to be that we've taken a step towards solving it, right? What's the old phrase, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Well, the same thing goes for our teams. And this is oftentimes why teams get stuck, is they just feel paralyzed. Hey, there's nothing we can do about this. It's such a huge issue. Well, that's not true. What's the next step you can take? So take the next step. Make sure that the team understands what it is. And make sure we understand who is going to be responsible for that. And do that for as many as you can get through. Then get to the closing the retrospective part of it. Kind of wrap up. Remind them, here's the journey we've taken, here's what we've uncovered, and here's what we're gonna do differently for next time. And now those items, they should go straight into your next sprint backlog, not product backlog, sprint backlog, right? They don't need to be prioritized because the product owner has been with you, they should have been with you in this meeting, it's the entire Scrum team. So the product owner has weighed in as well. This has been a team collective decision. So now those items should go into your sprint backlog, and you should do something about them in this next sprint. That's the whole concept of the Kaizen comes first, right? The good change should happen before we do anything else so we can get the benefit of it over a longer period of time. So that's kind of the idea here. And I wanted to give you that kind of really quick flyby to help you kind of see how to go about doing something like this, right? And I just picked one theme. I just picked Stranger Things because I thought it would be fun to work on. I thought it would be a fun kind of theme. And it might be fun for a team I was working with. But maybe that's not something that aligns to your team. Maybe your team has a bunch of people who are really into cricket. Well, do a cricket-themed one. Maybe you have a team that's around the Academy Awards time. And everyone's talking about, and now people don't do this as much anymore, but. Maybe they're all talking about who's going to Oscars this year or something. Well, do an Oscar-themed one. Or it can be around anything. Do it around award shows in general. It doesn't have to be just Oscars, but do it around any kind of award show. And you can pick up different themes. Again, if you're stuck, ask your favorite large language model and see what it comes up with. It's not all going to be gems that comes from that, but you can pick and choose and refine it, which is exactly what I did with my five themes for this. So I hope you see how easy it is to do that. It doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to be extremely creative to do this. You can make use of the tools that you have available to you. And as a Scrum Master, you can keep this fresh. You can tailor this to the team that you have. What is your team really into? What's the theme that they would really resonate with? Choose that. Go with that. Create a theme around that and see what they think about it. Afterwards, ask them, hey, did this work all right? Did you like this? I hope that's been useful to you. If you like this and you want to hear more like this, come to our website to mountngoatsoftware.com and check out our courses that we're launching actually this week, Better Retrospectives and the Retrospective Repair Guide. Those are the two that we really want to have you kind of think about. Come to our site, find out more about them. Better Retrospectives is all about just the expert level retrospectives course really gets into the heart of a lot of these issues at a very, very deep level. The retrospectives repair guide is taking the 10 most asked questions that we have about retrospectives at Mountain Goat Software and giving you really deep dives on how to solution those, how to problem solve those top 10 issues. And the great news for you is if you're listening to this in real time, right, when we've launched this, We're launching this as a two-for-one special. We'll not have that special again. So it's $99 that you get both of those courses. You don't have to pick and choose from them. You can give $99. They're prerecorded. You can watch them at your own pace. This is for people who want this knowledge, who want these answers. And I know when I was a Scrum Master starting out, there was a lot of, I followed a kind of the pattern that Mike established with his sprint repair guide. I bought that when I was coming up as a scrum master because I needed answers to some of the questions that he had in that scrum repair guide. Well, take a look at the 10 that we have for our retrospective repair guide. Maybe you'll find one of those things that's really tripping you up and maybe just getting the answer to one of those is going to be worth the money for you. I encourage you to go to our site, check it out. Don't miss this. It's a limited time cart that's opened. It's only going to be open for a week. So if you're listening to this when we launch it, don't delay, don't wait until next week. If you hear this next week, then you're running out of time. So make sure that you take advantage of the time that you have here so that you can get these two courses, two for the price of one here at our launch. Again, we won't do that again. So I hope you found this to be useful. It's just a little taste of the kind of thing that's in those courses for you. And if retrospectives are something that you're struggling with, or if retrospectives are something that you just feel like, man, it really could be more. It really could deliver more for my team. Check out these two courses. I really think they're gonna help a lot of teams out there. That's why we put them together. So that'll wrap it up. I hope you've enjoyed this and we'll talk to you next time. on another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast.

On Episode 132 of The Film '89 Podcast, Steve and Skye are joined by returning co-hosts, Jacob Rivera and Leighton Winstone to discuss a film from the director who has had the most coverage on Film '89, with no less than 5 episodes dedicated to his films and one of those being a double bill, it's legendary filmmaker, Martin Scorsese. The film being discussed is one that the guys have desperately wanted to cover since the podcast began, Scorsese's 1980 biopic of former World Middleweight boxing champion, Jake La Motta, starring Robert De Niro, it is of course Raging Bull. Shot in back and white and featuring a staggering, Oscar winning central performance by De Niro, Raging Bull also features stellar turns from Cathy Moriarty, in her debut acting role as La Motta's long suffering second wife, Vickie and Joe Pesci as La Motta's put upon brother, Joey. Raging Bull has become an enduring classic of cinema, hailed by many critics as one of the greatest films ever made and here it's given the in-depth Film '89 treatment for its 45th anniversary. 

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 Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com 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 the middle of March Madness as we're recording this right now. And I can pretty much guarantee you that every single one of those teams who's advancing on past, I think round one is going on right now, so passing on through round one, they're probably watching some film on their opponents. They're trying to see, what are they gonna do? What are some plays? How can we kind of counteract it? But more often than not, I would wager, I'm not a gambling man, but I'd wager, that they're looking at their own film and they're trying to see what did we do well in this game that got us the win? What can we improve? so that we could maybe have a little bit more of a bigger margin of victory. And what is it that we should probably stop doing? What is there that wasn't working out? Maybe our pick and rolls were not good, maybe we weren't executing well on those, or not to get too into basketball terms there, but maybe we should stop shooting so many threes or something like that. I don't know, right? But yeah, that's, yeah. Brian Milner (07:42) I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right that, you know, sometimes we think this retrospective thing is maybe, is this just a weird thing that we do in software development? No, this happens in a lot of professions. There's a lot of different professions out there that take time to analyze. And by the way, I'll throw this out there as well, because you mentioned kind of sports. Sometimes people will, I've encountered teams at times that think, You know what, we're good enough. We don't need to do this anymore. This is really only for teams when they're starting. We don't need to have retrospectives once we've become mature. Well, to them, I'd say, well, then why do championship teams continue to watch their film? Right? If a team won the Super Bowl last year, don't you think that they still go through training camp and get ready for the season? Yeah, they absolutely do. But they're on top of their game. So if they think it's necessary when they're on top of their game, is there really a moment that we would be so on top of our game that we have nothing left to learn and get better at? I'd say no. I think that there's always something that we can get better at. And I think that's a great analogy to kind of drive that home. Cort Sharp (08:54) Yeah, awesome. I totally agree with you there. Even just outside of the team sports world, I come from a more individual sport background. And it's so important to take some time and just reflect on, how did I perform? How was my performance, even on an individual level, so that I can take some action steps throughout this next period of training or work or whatever it is that I'm doing so that I can make the next next performance or the next time I race or the next time I get out there on the court or on the field or whatever. That's how I can make that next time better than this last time. So awesome. Thanks for clarifying. Thanks for. Brian Milner (09:28) Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, no, no, it's a great question. I think this is, probably time for us to kind of let the cat out of the bag here a little bit and just say, one of the reasons we wanted to focus on it for the episode is, drum roll, we kind of have a couple of courses coming out. here that we're going to offer at Mountain Goat Software that you can take around retrospectives. They're on demand videos that I worked on. They're two different separate courses. And we just thought this was an area that really needed some focus and attention and we were getting lots of questions around it. So we always try to listen to what you guys are telling us. And what we were hearing was, this is where you wanted us to focus. yeah, not a lot of details that I'm going to say right out of the gate. But yeah, we do want to kind of announce that those are coming here very, very soon. Cort Sharp (10:22) Yeah, so if I heard you right, I think you said this, but there's two courses coming out, right? Okay, cool. We're letting that out of the bag. Brian Milner (10:28) That's correct, yeah, two. right, right. I mean, you might think, one course I can understand, but two? Yeah, there's so much material that there was too much for one. And people could not consume all that in one go. And so we created two and kind of found different aims, different goals for both of them. to target what people were really asking for. So yeah, there are two separate courses. One that's going to be called Better Retrospectives, and another one that's called Retrospectives Repair Guide. So yeah, you can sell just from the names, kind of taking two different approaches here on focusing on retros. Cort Sharp (11:07) That's so awesome to hear that we have two separate types of courses that solve kind of two problems. So what were the reasons why you decided or Mountain Goat decided, hey, we probably need to make these to help solve some pain points. What were those pain points and what are these common struggles that you're seeing? Brian Milner (11:19) Yeah. Yeah, completely fair question, right? I mean, why didn't we do one on sprint planning? Or why didn't we do one on daily scrums or whatever, right? Well, maybe we will in the future. I think the kind of genesis of this idea or why we decided to focus on it was we periodically survey users. We watch what people do when they come to the site, what they search for. And one of our top search terms and one of the top search areas that we've seen over the years, really, it's been consistent, is around retrospectives. So we know that's an area people want to know more about and want to get help with. So that gave us the first little inkling that this might be something to focus on. That led us to doing just a free open webinar that we did. I hosted that, I put together a presentation to give some tips around it and help people, just a short little presentation, but wanted to just give some really quick tips people could apply. And we had over a thousand people sign up for that. not, I shouldn't say that. We had over a thousand people attend that. just, lots of people sign up and don't come, but. We had over thousand people who showed up and attended to hear that. And that kind of blew us away. think, wow, this is really, know, people made time in their day to come and listen to this, you know, short little webinar on it. There's interest here. And with a thousand people, we didn't have nearly enough time there on that webinar to answer everyone's questions and get through everything that was coming at us. But, you know, we love data. So. We pulled all that data from all the questions that had been submitted and people had presented to us and grouped them, categorized them, tried to sort them through and try to find what's the biggest kind of pressure, pain points that people are having that they wanna know answers to. And that's what led us to really create these courses is there were reoccurring themes, right? There was a kind of set of things that are common amongst people. common issues, common problems that people are having, common root causes of those problems. And we just thought, this is doable. It's not an impossible thing to fix. There are actually practical, real ways of solving these things. And we wanted to give people solutions to the things they wanted to hear about. So that's why we decided to focus on retrospectives. Cort Sharp (13:50) Awesome, sweet. That's still crazy to hear. I knew that you had a thousand people or a little over a thousand people attend that live stream, I think is what you did, right? Because it was like a YouTube live stream or something like that. That's still mind blowing to me that there was that much turnout and... Brian Milner (14:09) Actually, I just wanna say, I don't know that it actually even was on YouTube. That's what makes it even more kind of impressive to me is people had to like get a link and go into it. So it wasn't just, hey, I'm flipping through YouTube on my lunch break and it turned up. It was people who deliberately said, no, I'm making an appointment to go to that. Yeah. Cort Sharp (14:29) Man, that's even, yeah, that's crazier to me too. That's awesome. That tells me, yeah, there's a ton of demand for this, right? So can you give me just a brief overview without oversharing or sharing a little too much about what each course kind of offers and what problems they're working to solve or we're solving within each course? Brian Milner (14:31) Yeah. Sure. Yeah, I guess it's probably important to know the strategy of both of them and why there's two. As I said, there's just a lot of material, so it was too much to fit into one. But I tried to follow the pattern in creating these that we've established at Mountain Goat with previous classes. So the first one that I put together, we titled Better Retrospectives. And that's following the pattern that we've done with other things like better user stories. So better retrospectives, the focus is sort of the expert deep dive on retrospectives. We go deep on the meaning behind things and kind of facilitation techniques that are useful to do, patterns you can use in creating a retrospective, ways you can create brand new. themes for your retrospective that no one's ever done before in the past because it's yours. It's something you created on your own. And just kind of all the ins and outs of how to really make a retrospective work and be productive, produce things that actually make differences on your team. So that was better retrospectives. But we wanted to then address head on those most common questions that people have. Again, try to follow the pattern that we've established with some previous things here at Mountain Goat. Mike has a course that I took years ago called Scrum Repair Guide. And it was about the most common problems that Scrum teams have. so I follow that pattern here. And the second course is called Retrospective's Repair Guide. And what we did was we took those highest volume asked questions, the most common questions we got from that webinar. got just the top 10 and said, these are the biggies. These are the big ones that people are asking about that really want to know the answer to. And we put together a repair guide course for it so that people can maybe consume that in a little bit different way. If I'm having one big problem right now and I need an answer to that, or maybe I have two or three problems, I'm not having all the problems, but I need an answer. I need help with this big thing that's going on with my team. We wanted to get that to them as soon as possible. So the retrospective repair guide is that ability for someone to look at our list of top 10 questions. And you'll probably find three or four of them on there that you'd say, oh, yeah, that's one I've experienced. Yeah, that's one we're having right now. And then you can just kind of to the chase and get right to where it is that you need to get help. And then practically go and make those changes immediately. So better retrospectives. The expert course, Deep Dive on Retrospectives, makes you an expert at delivering them and working with them. Retrospectives Repair Guide, more for those finding the solutions to the problems you're having right now. Cort Sharp (17:37) Awesome. I want to kind of double click a little bit into the retrospective repair guide. Man, tongue twister, right? The retro repair guide. Can you share just like one or two, maybe three of those questions that are answered or some of those bigger questions that were asked that are answered and that you give a solution to and a very clear solution to within that course? Brian Milner (17:43) Yeah, it is a little. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. just know for each one of these, it's not a, the answer is, here's a sentence. Each one of these, we go really deep on how to answer that and strategies. And I give you multiple things that you can do. Because a lot of these maybe even have multiple root causes to them that could be causing them. And there could be something different you might need to do to solve that for your team. But you know, Like one of the biggest questions that we heard, probably the most popular question that we got was, how do you handle retrospectives when you have a quiet team? When you have a team of people that are a little more introverted or shy, not uncommon with a group of software developers. So how do you get them a little bit out of their shell or how do you get them to just feel safe enough there to actually contribute? That was a big one. Um, you know, a big one for our, our day and age is how do you handle retrospectives when you have people that are remote? Uh, you know, do you have an entirely remote team? Do you have people that are, uh, you know, parked your team? Part of your team is, is in-house part of your team is remote. Uh, how do you, how do you handle that split? Um, that was another big one. Um, you know, how do you handle it when you're, you have a team that just hates retrospectives? Um, you know, how do you, how do you, uh, How do you get your team to start really making progress, real progress, from the things that you talk about in your retrospectives? So these are just a couple of them. we really thought that these, for each one of them, as I went through each one of them, I thought, yeah, this is a big one. This is one I get questions about all the time in class. So there was none of them that I looked at and thought, this is a filler. Am I going to make it to 10? No, mean, it was hard to limit it to 10, you know? But yeah, we limited it to 10 and all of them are really, really important ones. Cort Sharp (19:47) You Yeah, nothing but heavy hitters here. Nothing but bangers. Here you go. Yeah, that's it. Awesome. OK, well, thanks for the overview. Thanks for introducing these courses. That last question there, what do I do? How do I manage a team within my retrospectives when they hate going to retrospectives or despise that? That'd be super useful for me. Man, I might buy this course right now. Brian Milner (19:55) Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Ha Yeah. Cort Sharp (20:23) But I would like to, we strive to have some pragmatic approaches. We strive to provide practical, immediately useful tips on this podcast. I know that's a big point for this podcast that you really work on and you really focus on. Do you have any just practical, immediately useful tips? Let's start out, I guess. This might be a little teaser, a little preview. You might repeat something that you gave out into the Retro's course there, the Retro Repair Guide. With quiet teams, can you just share something that I can immediately take away and go off if I have a really quiet team and it's like pulling teeth to get them to talk and participate in Retro's? Can you give me just some useful tips or something that I can go away with? Brian Milner (21:08) Yeah. Cort Sharp (21:13) after listening to this episode and go off and use with my team to help my quiet team be a little more active and a little more beneficial. Show them that, this retro is for you. What can I do to work with my quiet team here? Brian Milner (21:29) Yeah, yeah, no, mean, how can I tease the number one thing without giving any kind of advice on it, right? And no, I mean, we're doing this because we want to get this information out route. We want to help teams to be successful with this. So no, I don't mind at all going into some things that might help there on it. There'll be much more in the course because I just have more time to do that. I think that the number one thing when you have a quiet team is trying to understand the why behind it. So for starters, I think it's important for us to understand that there are different personality types. I mentioned things like introvertedness. There are people who are more introverted than others. And if that's a of a spectrum in itself. There are people who are extremely introverted, and there's people who are only mildly introverted. Not to mention, one of my favorite topics, thinking about kind of different neurodivergent traits and how they interact and participate and things of that nature. So all that's to say, that I think the number one thing that we have to do is know our team. We have to understand who is in the room. Because I think we make the mistake a lot of the times of, I'm gonna just put together a retrospective. Let me go find out what that guy on YouTube said about doing a retrospective. yeah, that was a fun little theme that he came up with. Let me go put that in place. But that may not match at all. the personality of your team. It may not match the way that they prefer to interact. If I have a team full of introverts, I'm not gonna do a big role play kind of exercise in my retrospectives, because everyone's gonna be uncomfortable and everyone's gonna shut down. They're gonna go into defensive kind of stance, right? So I think that's the number one thing I'd say is, first of all, just understand and respect. respect the differences there in personalities to understand that they're not broken or in need of repair in any way. If they are quieter, that's just who they are. That's just how they're made. So I think that's part of it, right? I think part is that you have to understand your team. But there are other possible root causes here as well. One of the biggest is they could be quiet because they don't feel safe to actually speak in that room. That's a huge one, right? And it's so important. If they come into that room and they are fearful that what they say in that room is going to be reported outside the room to someone else, or they're going to be made fun of in that room for voicing their opinion or belittled in some way for it, well, That's a killer to a retrospective. If there's not that sense of safety in the room, doesn't matter how brilliant your pattern is for the retrospective or what great idea you came up with for it. If I don't feel like this is a safe space where I can speak up and not be made fun of or not fear retribution for something I've said, I'm not gonna speak up. whether I'm an extrovert or an introvert. It doesn't really matter my personality type at that point because the fear is what's driving everyone in that room. So I think you have to maybe even gauge the team. Maybe even ask them in an anonymous poll. I've done this before by just giving slips of paper and everyone puts in a hat. And you can do something like a safety check where you say, give me a number from one to five. five being the highest and one being the lowest, how safe do you feel today in this room to speak honestly without fear of retribution or being made fun of, that sort of thing? And it could very much surprise you what the answer is. That's actually an activity that I repeat periodically when I have a team because I want to chart it. I want to see where they are now. I want to see if it goes up or down. If there's some kind of a change, how does that affect it? We had, we lost a team member or two team members and we had new people come on. Safety is going to drop because we have new people. God forbid if we have somebody who's an outsider who insists on coming into it. I try my best to keep them out, but hey, if my boss says, well, I'm overruling you, I'm coming in. Well, are you gonna quit immediately because that happens? Probably not. What can you do? Make it transparent, the effect. You can say, hey, we periodically take these safety checks. So here today, I took another safety check. Our normal average is 4.2. Today, it dropped to 2.1. Why do you think that happened? It's data. So I think safety is another big reason. Cort Sharp (26:13) Right. Right. Brian Milner (26:18) So let's, personality type, gotta understand personality type, gotta make sure the environment's safe. And by the way, kind of corollary to that is not only that it's safe, but that their opinion matters. So if they speak up and say things and no one pays attention to them, no one listens to them, well again, you're telling them your idea doesn't matter, learn this lesson, next time don't speak up, right? Cort Sharp (26:30) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (26:44) So they've got to have a safe space. And then I think you've got to match your activities to your team. You've got to find ways of connecting to them that will feel comfortable for them, that make them feel. I say this all the time in classes, facilitation, the root word in facilitation is facilis. It's a Latin word. means to make easy. So we're facilitating a retrospective. Make it easy. If your team doesn't want to role play, and you've got an activity that's a role play thing, then that's not easy. That's difficult for who they are. But if your team, another kind of difference, are they verbal processors? Do they need to talk things out to find a solution? Or do they need quiet space? that they need introspective time to find solutions. If that's the case, well, maybe I start with something like quiet writing. I don't even have an activity where they're talking to each other at the beginning. So I think that's third thing I'd throw out there is to say, Once you know your team, make sure you are matching the format, matching what you come up with for that retrospective to the personality of your team. It's hard, right? Someone can't walk in off the street and deliver a great retrospective to a team they don't know. But the good news is you know your team, right? You work with them all the time. You're the expert on this. Cort Sharp (28:08) you Yeah, yeah, as a more introverted person, nothing sounds worse to me than trying to, to do any kind of role playing, putting myself in some position that I just don't normally put myself into and I'm not comfortable with right that that is not my jam. That is not my thing. Brian Milner (28:27) Yeah. Yeah, and can you blame it when, if that happens, can you blame the team for saying they hate the retrospectives and that they don't want to do them anymore? Yeah. Cort Sharp (28:39) No, not at all. Not at all. If my scrum master came to me and said, right, we're going to, Brian, you're acting as this person, Court, you're acting as this, and we're going to reenact little Romeo and Juliet, bring that into there in this. And it's like, what? No, this isn't valuable. Brian Milner (28:47) You Right. Yeah, it's one thing to say, we're going to pretend to be each other and talk through. But it's another thing to say, pretend you are a peanut. you're like, that kind of thing. When you're an employee, you're like, god, really? I have to be a peanut now? Great, great. Yeah, no, this is fun. It's that kind of thing that if you don't, maybe your team would enjoy that kind of thing. If so, then match it to them. Cort Sharp (29:10) Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (29:19) They're not in that mode. No, no, no, no, no, no. Cort Sharp (29:23) Yep. Well, awesome. think I have a couple more questions for you here. Should be relatively quickly, right? Thanks for giving a little preview and giving some practical advice for what we can do to help our more quiet teams. But I want to take a step back. I know we double clicked into that one course, but I just want to take a step back a little bit. how do I decide which courses is right for me? Brian Milner (29:28) Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cort Sharp (29:48) Do you have any guidelines for that? Any advice for if I'm interested in both courses, but I don't know which one would be a little more beneficial for me? How do I make that choice? Brian Milner (29:58) Yeah, that would be an extremely difficult decision to make because you have to really know these courses intimately, think, to make that, or maybe not intimately, but you probably have to dive a little bit deeper into what the agenda is for each one to kind of know the answer. But here's the good thing. When we're launching these, I can tell you this as well. We're going to be launching it as sort of a two for one. So. The good news is when we, know, for the initial launch of this, that's going to be the bonus for being in the first group is you don't have to decide. You'll get them both and you can then, you know, choose on your own. can dip in and see, you know, if one's better for you than the other, great. But you can consume it any way you want. And, you know, I'm just really excited for people to get to see the stuff and to hear it. I think there's some. there's some stuff that's really gonna help people in it. Cort Sharp (30:47) Awesome, great. Helping my decision fatigue there, Brian. That's great. Wonderful. One less choice that I have to make. Well, great. Awesome. That's kind all the questions that I have for you. Are there any kind of key takeaways or anything that you want to single out about retrospectives as a whole or anything about these courses that are going to be offered here anytime soon or anything like that? Brian Milner (30:50) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I wanted to do this kind of an episode about this because, you know, I feel like the listeners here to our podcast, you guys know me, you know, the kind of stuff that I talk about. And, you know, I wanted you to be the ones who kind of heard this and knew about it first. I think it's going to be really beneficial and it's going to really kind of turbo charge a lot of teams. We talked about why retrospectives are important. Well, as I said, it's the engine for that continual improvement. If you don't have it, then the team stagnates. If you do have it and they buy in and this is, they're really all in on that Kaizen continual. improvement, know, Kaizen comes first mindset that kind of comes along with it. Then they look forward to this meeting. It's not just, know, something to check the box at the very end of our sprint, but it's actually, you know, when are we going to have that retrospective? I've got some stuff I want to talk about and that's our time now. You know, we can shut out the rest of the world. We can shut out, you know, everyone who's not here in our team. And now we can focus on us. You know, the question I often ask the teams when I do this is, do retrospectives is, what would it take for us to be the team everyone else wishes they were on? And, you know, that's really what you can accomplish through a retrospective is you can be that team, everyone else in the group and the organization looks at and goes, man, I wish I was on that team. That team's the, that team looks like a great team to be on. You know, I know there's, we're not given a lot of details here because this isn't We're not opening sales to this at the time that you hear this, when this podcast comes out. This is just a preview. I wanted to announce it here in the podcast first and let you guys know about it. Stay tuned. We're gonna have some stuff coming out soon. You can come to our website, mountaingoatsoftware.com and you'll find more information about this. But stay tuned here to the podcast as well. We're going to talk about some other things around podcasts in the next few weeks. we'll let you know when it's going to be open. I'll tell you as well, this is going to be a limited time thing. It's not something that we're launching and then kind of keeping open forever. This is something that we're going to launch. And there's a window for you to actually purchase this. receive both these at the same time. We'll talk about pricing and all that other stuff later down the road. But I just wanted you guys to know that these two things were coming. And hopefully, that gets you excited. And you can start now saying, hey, boss, there's something I'm going to be asking you for here for the training budget or something somewhere along the way. So stay tuned. We'll have more information here about it in the coming weeks. Cort Sharp (33:51) Yeah So we're starting the hype train now. Hype train is starting to pull out of the station. And the next station it comes into, it's only going to be there for a limited time. So make sure you get on board and get on with this. Because these sound like really awesome classes. And they sound like a really great way to either elevate where you're at already or where I'm at already for retrospectives and whatever techniques I'm using. I know we didn't talk much or really at all. Brian Milner (34:01) Yeah, exactly. Cort Sharp (34:26) other than the title of the Better Retrospectives course. But having been through the Better User Stories course, that really elevated my ability to write and facilitate user story work or story writing workshops. But it allowed me to be more effective on the user stories front. if it's anything following that trend line, which it sounds like it kind of is, that Better Retrospectives course sounds like a fantastic way to elevate. Brian Milner (34:46) Yeah. Cort Sharp (34:53) my ability to not only facilitate, but also just get more value out of retrospectives. And then the retro repair guide. Awesome starting point. Sounds like it's a great spot if I'm struggling with anything. Really, really common. Well, not really common. The biggest questions, biggest problems that are seen throughout retrospectives. Great starting point in order to. help myself grow and get up there. And the fact that I don't have to choose between the two, that's fantastic to me. makes me really excited. Brian Milner (35:25) Yeah. Bonus, right? Yeah. Well, and I do want to throw out there as well. know, the pattern here, I'm copying Mike, right? This is what Mike Kona has done previously. And I'm with you, Court. When I took the Better User Stories course, you know, I really wanted to go deep on user stories. I wanted to understand them at a level that I just didn't previously. And I wanted to know the ins and outs. I was ready to go deep on it. And I agree with you. did the same thing for me. It helped me to really fully understand kind of what this method is and how to get the most out of it. So that was my idea when I wanted to copy that into the retrospectives. I wanted the same thing. I wanted people who were at that point where they're ready to go deep. Here it is, right? It's ready for you. And retrospectives, the repair guide as well, I was a consumer of Mike's Scrum Repair Guide before I joined Mountain Goats, you know, when I was a Scrum Master on a team. And I remember when I saw that course and I saw the list of things that, you know, he was going to talk about in that course. There were two or three of them on that list that I just said, yeah, star that one, star this one, like that. I need that answer. I just remember that feeling of, I really need the answer to this. So my thought at that time was, whatever this is, It's worth it because I don't know how to do this on my team right now. We're having this problem and I need it fixed. So I need guidance on how to do this. And I know there's people out there that are gonna feel that way about some of these topics they're gonna see that we have in the repair guide. So all that's just to say, it's from the point of view of someone who benefited from that pattern, you know, from Mike and other courses. And I'm hopefully going to be able to do that for people here with retrospectives as well. Cort Sharp (37:15) Well, I'm excited. So a couple action points for anyone else who's interested in this. Stay tuned, right? Stay tuned for future episodes on the podcast. Keep an eye out on stuff. Can they visit mountainghostsoftware.com right now and sign up for a list or anything or get any pre-emails or anything like that or not quite yet? Brian Milner (37:33) I don't think there's anything that you can do at the moment. mean, if you're on our email list, I think that's probably the best thing you can do. You sign up for our email list. You can do that pretty easily at mountandgoatsoftware.com. And that'll keep you informed when we send out our newsletters. We're gonna have information on it there as well. But it's kind of like, you you get those emails sometimes that just say nothing right now, but, so nothing right now, but, you know, kind of just... File this away, know this is, you in the next few weeks, you're gonna hear more about this and then it'll be that limited window that you can actually, you know, take advantage of it. Cort Sharp (38:07) Awesome. Yeah, so keep listening in, keep an eye out, and we'll keep giving you some practical approaches, practical tips that you can use to go into your next retrospective. Maybe your team isn't the quiet team, but maybe they're the ones that just don't really like retros. know, Brian, thanks for helping me out with my quiet teams, or any time that I interact with quiet teams, and even the ones that are a little more just passive and don't. Brian Milner (38:28) Nah. Cort Sharp (38:34) don't really see the value in retros. Thanks for sharing those tips and for helping me out with all the teams that I work with. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Brian Milner (38:42) Yeah, absolutely. If you can't tell, I'm really excited about it. I can't wait for people to start diving into this stuff. more than anything, I can't wait for it to start to make a difference in teams. Cort Sharp (38:53) I'm excited, Brian. I can't wait. I'm stoked. Brian Milner (38:54) you

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The AI Bot described our conversation as.... Join us for an engaging episode where we kick off with a stroll down memory lane, discussing the upcoming 30th high school reunion and the excitement, or lack thereof, surrounding it. As we debate the merits of attending, the conversation naturally evolves into a reflection on personal growth and the nostalgia of reconnecting with old friends. The episode takes an intriguing turn with an in-depth discussion about the world of wrestling, exploring the rise and legacy of Vince McMahon. We dive into the intricacies of the wrestling business, its evolution over the years, and the impact of cultural shifts on the industry. This discussion also touches on the ethical considerations and controversies faced by wrestling moguls, prompting a conversation about power dynamics and societal responsibilities. We wrap up with a light-hearted look at current entertainment, recounting modern TV experiences and the peculiarities of consuming sports in today's digital age. This episode promises a blend of nostalgia, critical analysis, and a dash of humor as we reflect on the past, present, and future of wrestling and reunions.

On This Weeks Episode of The Super Review Show's Career Retrospectives - Podcast Edition the J-Man, Kyle Q and Mike breakdown the latest album by Dream Theater... Parasomnia! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

Send us a textProject Management Masterclass is celebrating its one-year anniversary! In this special episode, host Brittany Wilkins reflects on the journey—nearly canceling the podcast before a powerful review and LinkedIn messages reignited her passion for teaching project management. She also breaks down the top five trends from the show's most popular episodes, covering key fundamentals, strategies for success, nine proven methods for project excellence, insights from the PMI Global Summit, and what it takes to go beyond project constraints. Tune in for a year's worth of growth, milestones, and invaluable lessons learned!  

Send us a textIn this episode:Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dave Westgarth, a delivery manager based in the northeast of England, where we explore the art of project management mastery. From his rich experience in technology projects to his deep understanding of Agile and Lean principles, Dave shares insights that are crucial for anyone looking to elevate their project management skills.We discuss the transformative power of Agile retrospectives—how they are not merely a requirement, but rather an opportunity for teams to enhance their collaboration, reflect on successes, and address challenges. Through engaging dialogues, we unpack the myriad of techniques that can invigorate these sessions, ensuring they remain impactful rather than routine.Moreover, Dave reveals how Lean methodologies serve as the backbone of many Agile strategies, enhancing the efficiency of project delivery and enabling managers to streamline processes for maximum value. His passion for these frameworks is palpable, inspiring listeners to consider how these principles could reshape their own projects.Communication emerges as another critical theme throughout our discussion, with Dave emphasizing its pivotal role in project success. By understanding diverse communication styles within their teams, project managers can tailor their approaches for better outcomes.This episode resonates with the principles of community, as we reflect on the importance of learning from peers in the project management realm. We invite you to discover these powerful insights that can redefine your perception of project management. Don't forget to subscribe for more episodes filled with valuable knowledge and tools that can help project managers thrive.Links: Connect with Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-westgarth/Check out Dave's PURE course here: https://www.puremanagementalliance.com/#6758602971391Linktree: www.linktr.ee/davewestgarthPM-Mastery Links: For a full podcast episode list, visit here: PM-Mastery Podcast Episodes. For a full list of blog posts, go here: PM-Mastery Blog Posts Become a PURE PM: https://pm-mastery.com/pure Check out Instructing.com for all your PM course needs: https://www.instructing.com/?ref=bd5e5c Get your free PDU Tracker here: https://pm-mastery.com/resource_links/

Season Hughes: How A Product Cancellation Tests a New Scrum Master's Growth Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. As a new Scrum Master, Season faced a challenging situation when her team learned their product would be canceled. Initially, she made the mistake of telling team members they could skip daily standups if they had higher priorities, leading to unexpected low attendance. During the retrospective, she transformed this challenge into a learning opportunity by helping team members reflect on their personal growth and lessons learned. This experience taught her the importance of maintaining team ceremonies while providing individual support during difficult transitions. In this segment, we talk about ORSC, a systems inspired team and relationship coach training. Self-reflection Question: How would you maintain team engagement and motivation when facing a product cancellation? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

On This Week's Episode of The Super Review Show's Career Retrospectives - Podcast Edition, The J-Man, Kyle and Mike, Spun the wheel and it landed on Kyles pick of the Green Day Side Project Foxboro Hottubs "Stop Drop and Roll" from 2007... Enjoy!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

On Episode 131 of The Film ‘89 Podcast, Steve, Neil and Skye are joined by returning co-hosts, Bill Scurry and Matthias Van De Roest to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Academy Award winning crime thriller, The Usual Suspects (1995). Critically acclaimed upon its release and making a considerable worldwide box office haul on a meagre $6 million budget, it's amazing ensemble case, incredible Oscar winning script, precise editing and sharp direction would make it an endearing classic of the 1990s. Unfortunately the film doesn't get spoken about as frequently as it once did, likely due to the controversy that arose in the intervening years surrounding its director and one of its stars. But putting aside those issues and examining it purely as a work of collaborative art, The Usual Suspects remains one of the greatest crime dramas ever conceived and is a film that's endlessly rewarding and rewatchable.

We look back on the season and send-off our characters. Support us at https://ko-fi.com/desperateattune and at https://www.patreon.com/DesperateAttune Follow us at https://twitter.com/DesperateAttune Desperate Attune's season 2 is hosted by Prince Edited by Zoheb (Klow), tree and Aadiyat (Soap) Featuring Prince and salty Blades in the Dark by John Harper and Evil Hat Productions With thanks to Johnstone Metzger Duellist playbook by Zoheb (klow) Skovlan playbooks by Prince Iruvian playbooks by Johnstone Metzger Intro music is 'Jalandhar' by Kevin Macleod Outro music is 'Alapana in Kiravani Ragam' by U. Srinivas Recap music is 'Alapana in Shankarabharanam Ragam' by U. Srinivas Sound effects from Pixabay.com Cover art by Fahim Anzoom Rumman (botagainsthumanity) 

On This Weeks Episode of The Super Review Show's Career Retrospectives - Podcast Edition the J-Man, Q, and Mike spun the wheel and disucss Bush's Razorblade Suitcase!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

On Episode 130 of The Film ‘89 Podcast, Neil & Skye will be grabbing their glow-rods and avoiding physical contact greetings as they jump forward in time from a crime ridden Los Angeles of 1996, to a seemingly harmonious, but borderline fascist utopian 2032 San Angles as they discuss the 1993 action-science-fiction cult classic, Demolition Man, from producer Joel Silver and then first time director, Marco Brambilla. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock in her breakout role. The guys discuss how this seemingly by-the-numbers ‘90s action film has transcended its roots due to it having layers of subtly clever social commentary and a level of mind boggling prescience that has helped it continue to age like a fine wine with each passing decade. 

On This Weeks Episode of The Super Review Show's Career Retrospectives, The J-Man, Q and Mike discuss and breakdown The Who's Who's Next from 1971!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

On This Weeks Episode of The Super Review Show's Career Retrospectives - Podcast Edition the J-Man, Kyle, and Mike spun the wheel and discuss Bon Jovi's Lost Highway from 2007, Enjoy!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

CTO Series: Engineering Leadership, Automation, and Trust with Dan Hollinger   In this CTO Series episode, we sit down with Dan Hollinger, an accomplished engineering leader passionate about fostering empathy, transparency, and trust in tech teams. Dan shares pivotal lessons from his career, from building scalable automation systems to navigating complex leadership challenges. We cover key strategies for aligning tech initiatives with business goals, fostering collaboration, and ensuring long-term technical health.   Defining Leadership Through Automation and Empowerment   “Enable your humans to focus on the interesting work—automation should take care of the rest.”   Dan recounts his transformative experience at CCP Games, makers of EVE Online, where a robust test automation system changed his perspective on scaling technical processes. This role introduced him to the power of automation in freeing up engineers to focus on more exploratory and impactful tasks. He emphasizes how empowering self-directed teams with high-level vision statements enables creativity and innovation.   Building Self-Correcting Processes   “Always retro your processes—don't let them run on autopilot.”   Dan explains the importance of self-correcting processes, using the SEV (Side Event) system as an example. He highlights how retrospectives can improve response times and prevent future crises. For Dan, consistent reviews are the key to maintaining agile, resilient systems that adapt to evolving needs.   Bridging the Gap Between Business and Tech   “There are no enemies—treat your colleagues like allies working toward a common goal.”   In cross-functional environments, Dan's mantra is to focus on the project and maintain open communication. Drawing from his experience in gaming, where multiple departments collaborate on creative projects, he underscores the importance of empathy and curiosity. Asking questions and breaking down solutions into smaller, reviewable pieces can diffuse conflict and build trust.   Future-Proofing Through Strategic Roadmapping   “The lifespan of the solution dictates the scope of the work.”   Dan shares his approach to strategic roadmapping by considering the expected longevity of technical solutions. He gives an example of building a feature flag system for a game studio that needed to support a long-term vision while adapting to a new game engine. His advice: break large goals into smaller, adaptable increments that align with future changes.   Navigating Leadership Challenges During Organizational Change   “Trust is your greatest currency during periods of uncertainty.”   Dan reflects on a particularly challenging period when a leadership change caused a significant exodus of engineers at his company, leaving him with only one engineer. Despite the setback, Dan leaned into transparency and empathy, earning the trust of departing team members, which helped him transfer knowledge and rebuild the team.   Expanding the Scope of Leadership   “My role expanded from leading an engineering team to caring about the morale of the entire company.”   A surprising revelation for Dan was realizing the broader impact of his leadership on non-engineering teams. He discusses how this shift required him to listen to and support colleagues across all departments, emphasizing the value of empathy-driven leadership.   The Book That Shaped Dan's Leadership Approach   “The DORA metrics help us measure what really matters for technical health.”   Dan highlights the book Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren et al., which introduced him to the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics. These metrics help organizations measure software delivery performance and technical health, offering a data-driven approach to evaluate progress and identify improvement areas.   About Dan Hollinger   Dan Hollinger is a proven engineering leader who champions empowerment through support, empathy, and transparency. He fosters a culture of trust, prioritizing alignment over dictation. Technically adept, Dan advocates for automatable solutions and a blameless environment, ensuring his team thrives both personally and professionally in a collaborative space. You can link with Dan Hollinger on LinkedIn.

On This Weeks Episode of The Super Review Show's Career Retrospectives - Podcast Edition, J-Man, Mike and Kyle Q spun the wheel and broke down Boston's 2002 album Corpertate America. Enjoy!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuperReviewShowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesuperreviewshow/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSuperReviewShow

In this special episode of The Legacy Club, we dive into the world of Retrospectives—where curiosity takes center stage, and we Continue readingRetrospective Discoveries | The Legacy Club Podcast The post Retrospective Discoveries | The Legacy Club Podcast first appeared on Leal Legacy.

Episode 129 of The Film ‘89 Podcast, our first of 2025, is a companion piece to our episode from last February, Episode 112, where Steve, Skye and John Arminio discussed Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, and both Tod Browning's 1931 film adaptation as well as Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 version, Bram Stoker's Dracula. For this episode, the same trio will be giving you their in-depth and spoiler filled review and analysis of director Robert Eggers' remake of F.W. Murnau's 1922 German expressionist silent horror classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, this new version titled simply, Nosferatu. As well as Murnau's film, the guys will also be discussing acclaimed German director Werner Herzog's 1979 remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre.

The latest leg of our flight through entirety comes to a gentle landing this week, but before we all head off to collect our luggage, all seven of us take the opportunity to say goodbye to Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat in one last retrospective. Notes and links Thank you to those of you who sent us questions: Kate Orman, Doctor What and General Witchfinders. In our discussion of Sleep No More, Brendan reaches for the name of Bethany Black's love interest in the episode, but goes slightly astray. The name he's after is Chopra, played by the astoundingly beautiful Neet Mohan. In Episode 2 of Flight Through Entirety, Richard famously compares Hartnell's performance style to Marlene Dietrich's. This week, he bookends that beautifully with a comparison of Peter Capaldi's style to Maggie Smith's, particularly her Oscar-winning performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Richard alludes to this story from 2015, in which a team consisting of Peter Capaldi, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss came third in a Doctor Who pub trivia competition at a Doctor Who convention in Sydney. Follow us Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Brendan is at @retrobrendo.bsky.social, Todd is at @toddbeilby.bsky.social, James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social and Simon is at @simonmoore.bsky.social. Richard is on X at @RichardLStone. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on Mastodon, X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we'll abandon you for a few years, leaving you with only a couple of Flight Through Entirety-style Doctor Who podcasts to keep you entertained in the meantime. And more You can find links to all of the podcasts we're involved in on our podcasts page. But here's a summary of where we're up to right now. Now that Flight Through Entirety is taking a break, you should all go and subscribe to 500 Year Diary, our latest new Doctor Who podcast, in which we go back through the history of the show and examine new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early in 2024, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season, The Second Coming, early in 2025. The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire recently released our hot take on Ncuti Gatwa's second Christmas Special (and Steven Moffat's ninth), Joy to the World. And we'll be back again in 2025 to talk about Season 2. Last week, The Three-Handed Game released their first Christmas Special, discussing the 1966 Avengers episode Too Many Christmas Trees, in which Steed's weird Christmas nightmares start to become reality. The boys will be back in 2025 for the third episode in their triptych The Pop Explosion. Maximum Power is back at last with its long-awaited coverage of the 1981 season of Blakes 7. Last weekend we released our discussion on the season's controversial second episode — Power. And finally there's our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. This week, we watched a notoriously silly early episode of Deep Space Nine, the widely reviled but never forgotten Move Along Home. Thank you very much for listening: we'll see you again in a few years. And on all of our other podcasts, of course.

Jimmy Fallon, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Geena Davis, Andy Cohen, and more! Stars share stories from their Hollywood starts and reveal their biggest tribulations and triumphs with never-before-told stories. Jimmy Fallon before he was famous performing at an ET party. Plus, Jennifer Love Hewitt on the roles that changed her life. And, the moment that stalled her singing career. Then, Melissa Joan Hart on her after-hours parties with Britney Spears. And, Raven Symone from her “Cosby Show” star, to her biggest career regret. A special ET full of rETrospectives.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mon Carnet, le podcast de Bruno Guglielminetti Vendredi 27 décembre 2024 Grandes rencontres : L'homme de publicité Jean-Jacques Stréliski (1:24) Le philosophe du numérique Hervé Fischer (43:54) Retrospectives techno 2024 : Maxime Johnson (1:31:09) Carl-Edwin Michel (1:39:01) Billet : Ricoul : La face cachée de notre dépendance numérique (1:46:27) Collaborateur : Stéphane Ricoul www.MonCarnet.com Une production de Guglielminetti.com Décembre 2024

On Episode 128 of The Film ‘89 Podcast, Neil and Skye are joined by returning co-host, filmmaker, producer and master cinephile, Adam Rackoff. When planning what films to cover on Film ‘89, we invariably aim to choose films that we love and want to talk about but always consider whether you, our valued listeners would want to hear us discuss those same films. Well, for the film we've chosen for this episode, we've been wholly self indulgent for once. Christmas is coming so we've decided to treat ourselves and pick a film that Neil and Skye have wanted to champion and discuss on the podcast since it first started. That film is a Star Trek film and it's the first big screen outing for The Next Generation crew and something of a passing of the torch between the original series crew and the TNG gang, Star Trek: Generations. Generations is often regarded as one of the lesser loved Trek films and as much as it seems to have been more positively reappraised in recent years, it's not going to feature on most fans' lists of their favourite Star Trek films, but for Neil, Skye and Adam, the opposite is true. So as well as giving the film the usual in-depth Film ‘89 analysis for its 30th anniversary, our trio of hosts are going to try and get to the bottom of just why they love this oft-maligned film so much. 

We've spent the last twelve weeks enjoying some unexpected extra time with Peter Capaldi and friends, and so it's finally time to kick back and chat about what we've loved, what we've learned, and (inevitably) who we'd snog. It's the Series 10 Retrospective. Notes and links Thank you to the people who contributed their questions: Luke Hobbs, Si Hart and David Kitchen. And remember that we have a shiny new-ish Bluesky account, which is the best way to follow us online these days. And for the very last time, probably, we reference Friend from the Future, a promotional short designed to introduce Bill Potts, first broadcast during Match of the Day on 23 April 2016, nearly a year before this season began. You can see the entire short here. And just as a reminder, the Jenny Laird Award goes to a season or era's most puzzling creative choice, and the Bonnie Langford goes to someone or something that is surprisingly and delightfully good. Follow us Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is at @toddbeilby.bsky.social and James is at @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The Flight Through Entirety theme was arranged by Cameron Lam. You can follow Flight Through Entirety on Bluesky, as well as on Mastodon, X and Facebook. Our website is at flightthroughentirety.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we'll think of the right words later. And more You can find links to all of the podcasts we're involved in on our podcasts page. But here's a summary of where we're up to right now. 500 Year Diary is our latest new Doctor Who podcast, going back through the history of the show and examining new themes and ideas. Its first season came out early this year, under the title New Beginnings. Check it out. It will be back for a second season early in 2025. The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire has broadcast our hot takes on every new episode of Doctor Who since November last year, and it will be back again in 2025 for Season 2. The Three-Handed Game makes a triumphant return to your podcatcher with Part 2 of its The Pop Explosion triptych, Build a Better Mousetrap, in which Cathy Gale joins a motorcycle gang which is threatened by witches, which is a thing that basically happened all the time in the 1960s. And finally there's our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford. Nathan and Joe took the week off this week, but last week, we enjoyed a widely-reviled episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called Ferengi Love Songs.

On Episode 127 of The Film ‘89 Podcast, Skye and returning guest host, acclaimed film poster artist, Tony Stella, continue their annual coverage of the long running James Bond series of films with 1964's Goldfinger. Directed by Guy Hamilton, Goldfinger is the third film in the series and is based on the seventh James Bond book by author Ian Fleming. This time Bond is tasked by the Bank of England and Mi6 to investigate gold magnate Auric Goldfinger, who they suspect is building up a vast inventory of gold by nefarious means. Sean Connery's third outing as the British super spy is regarded by many as the pinnacle of the franchise, now the longest running in film history, and features a superb cast including Gert Fröbe as the titular villain as well as Honor Blackman and Shirley Eaton as two of the most memorable Bond girls. The word iconic is often overused in the realm of film criticism, but Goldfinger is filled with moments and situations that truly earn that description. So join the guys as they give their usual passionate, in-depth analysis of the film for its 60th anniversary.

The Software Process and Measurement Cast Crew are off for an adventure. We will be back on December 8th with new content. In the interim, we share four gems from our back catalog of over 800 interviews, essays, and conversations. You can check out the entire catalog at . Today we return to June 202 (SPaMCAST 605) for a conversation with Jodie Kane. Jodie and I discussed involving product owners in retrospectives. Jodie suggests the answer should not be cut and dry but rather context-driven.   Master Work Intake! Join one of two upcoming Mastering Work Intake Workshops to help you learn to address IT's nastiest, dirtiest little secret…poor work intake. The next workshop is taking a compressed approach to help kickstart 2025!  Seats are available on: December 6th 9 AM EST   Noon EST More information and registration at  Simply put if you don't control work intake IT CONTROLS YOU!   No workshops for you?  Buy a copy of Mastering Work Intake and begin to take control of the flow of work for your team and organization.  Order a copy of the book from JRoss Publishing -  or via Amazon -     Next SPaMCAST  SPaMCAST 837 through 840 will be reruns of some of my favorite shows from the early 2000's. I am off on a vacation.  We will be back with new content with SPaMCAST 841  

On Episode 126 of The Film ‘89 Podcast, Steve and Skye are joined by returning co-host Becky D'Anna. Becky is a marketing executive for Sony Pictures, a seasoned podcaster and an expert on film and the film industry, making her the ideal guest-host with which to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 thriller, Rear Window, starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Shot on just one location, a huge set built on the Paramount Studios backlot, Rear Window is the ultimate tale of voyeurism as Stewart's wheelchair bound photographer, L.B. Jeffries, ropes in his beautiful socialite girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) and his insurance company appointed nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) into his personal investigation into what he believes is the murder of one of the residents of his bustling tenement block. A masterclass in visual storytelling, Rear Window is one of the Master of Suspense's most beloved films and certainly one of several peaks in a staggering filmography, a movie that would influence filmmakers for decades to come. 

Episode 125 of The Film ‘89 Podcast is our 2024 Halloween Horror Special and joining Skye and regular co-host John Arminio, is author, podcast producer, filmmaker and expert in all things horror related, J. Blake Fichera. Last year it was The Exorcist, and the focus of this year's Halloween episode is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of another equally remarkable, influential and iconic horror classic, Tobe Hooper's, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Made on a meagre budget with a cast of unknowns, Hooper's film would quickly achieve iconic status and go on to permeate popular culture like few other horror films before it. It would become hugely influential but would never be equalled in terms of its almost documentary approach to the fictional events it depicts, inspired by the exploits of real life killers such as Ed Gein. The guys discuss the making of the film and explore the many layers of sociopolitical commentary that Hooper intentionally or even subconsciously weaved into this macabre work of art, a stunningly shot, meticulously crafted, grimy and unsettling masterpiece of horror cinema, laid bare by the experts at Film ‘89.