Few years ago I got invited to attend RFG16 (Retrospective Facilitators Gathering ‘16) in Portugal. It is hard to describe such an event, but the simple description would be that it is a week long unconference [wiki]. A limited group of 30 wonderful people comes together to share their bright minds about continuous improvement as well as facilitation.

Second week of March I’ve spend a week at RFG18. I love to take opportunities like these to sharpen my skills on designing and facilitating scaled retrospectives. The attendants are often open-minded towards experimentation and it helps the next organizers to make the event even better. Added benefit is that I volunteered to be one of the organizers for the next edition of RFG in Europe in 2020!
Every year the event switches between Europe and America, and I was lucky enough that in 2018 it took place in my home country at Noordwijk, Netherlands. Being in a different place and context for a week, still made it feel like I was on vacation abroad.

There is way too much to share about what I got out of the week, so the focus of this blogpost will be on the scaled monster retro I designed together with @Toby Baier and @Silvana Wasitova. To get people in a creative mindset when trying to come up with improvements, I prefer to design retro’s which have a strong theme with some storytelling. The version I’ll share with you below is a combination of how we hoped it would go, what we actually ran and what came out of the evaluation (retroception) to do differently next time.

Header image by AnimeVeteran on DeviantArt. On the right the good Dr. Jekyll and on the left the bad Mr. Hyde.

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