What is the KALM retrospective?
The KALM retrospective is used by a team to assess the things they are doing to deliver value, and what could be improved. You’ll look at your current processes with four different perspectives, and each person will contribute their own ideas from each perspective. It should take a team 45-75 minutes to complete, depending on team size and number of sticky notes! This retrospective format provides a polite way for team members to contribute their opinion, so is good for occasions where people might feel uneasy sharing.
The four perspectives are:
Keep – Something we are doing well and delivers value
Add – A new idea or experiment you’d like to bring to the table
Less – Things we could do less of without losing value
More – Something we’re already doing that could bring more value
How to run the KALM retrospective
- Introduce the template and each section to the team.
- Each person adds their ideas to the four areas – make sure to use private writing to hide your sticky notes until you’re ready to share!
- Going section-by-section, each person reveals and presents their sticky notes.
- Group similar sticky notes into themes.
- Hold a voting round to identify the top priorities for the team – suggested 3 votes per person.
- Everyone brainstorms solutions to the top issues and the team votes once more on the top ideas.
- Assign owners and due dates to the top-voted solutions. Typically there should be no more than 3 actions for the team.
Pro-tips
The retrospective is best run in the order:
- Keep
- Less
- More
- Add
This starts the session on a positive note by identifying the good things to ‘Keep’, then sandwiches the potentially negative ‘Less’ category in the middle of the session, and rounds off positively with the ‘More’ and ‘Add’ sections. The Add section is deliberately placed last to allow people to come up with ideas from the previous three sections, and give time for ‘blue-sky’ thinking at the end of the session.
