Throughout my agile journey I’ve experienced and facilitated many retrospective meetings for agile teams but also for long running projects. Often I’ve experienced that teams and sometimes even facilitators are not familiar with common basic structure of activities that an agile retrospective meeting should follow in order to make the meeting go smoothly and to generate qualitative action items for improvement. From my experience it helps teams a lot to when retrospectives are created along this structure of activities. The structure is published in the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, which I strongly recommend for anyone who is new to the subject.

Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a method that helps to reduce meeting times and make meetings more effective. The method is nowadays widely spread since it is simple, robust and effective. With this post I want to introduce the method briefly and also tell you about some experiences I’ve made using it.