The one sentence to read before every retro
2026-10-06 · The Scrums team
Norm Kerth's Prime Directive is twenty-five years old and still the best way to open a retrospective. Here's why it works, and how to make it more than words on a slide.
In 2001, Norm Kerth published Project Retrospectives, the book that gave the team retrospective its shape. It opens with one sentence that teams still read aloud before their retros, a quarter of a century later:
"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."
It's known as the Prime Directive, and it does one job: it moves the conversation from who to what. A retro that hunts for someone to blame teaches people to hide problems. A retro that looks at the situation they were in teaches them to bring problems up early.
Making it more than words
Reading the sentence is easy. Running a retro that lives up to it takes a few deliberate choices:
- Let people write before anyone speaks. In Scrums, everyone writes their cards privately, and other people's cards stay face-down until they're revealed together. Nobody has to be the first to say the hard thing.
- Keep the author out of it. Retros in Scrums are anonymous by default: the authors of cards never leave our server, even after the reveal. In anonymous retros, comments can be anonymous too.
- Talk about the work. Each topic in Scrums gets one thread for the discussion and its action items, so the conversation stays on the problem and ends with what to change.
- Follow through. Nothing makes a team trust a retro like seeing last time's action items done. The next retro opens with them, in the Review step.
A way to start
Some teams read the Prime Directive at the top of every retro. Others turn it into the warm-up. Scrums' Icebreaker step lets the facilitator write their own question, such as: What made your work harder this sprint that wasn't anyone's fault?
Run a retro in your browser, no account needed, and see how it feels when nobody's looking for someone to blame.
More on running retrospectives in Scrums.