The starfish retrospective
Keep doing, less of, more of, stop doing and start doing. Five arms for feedback with more nuance than a plain start and stop.
The starfish retrospective has five arms: keep doing, less of, more of, stop doing and start doing. Patrick Kua described it on his blog in 2006, as a way past the usual split between what went well and what didn't.
The arms work as a scale. Instead of only start or stop, people can say "a bit less" or "a bit more." That makes it easier to question a practice without arguing to get rid of it, and to back one without making it a rule.
The five arms
- Keep doing: Valuable practices to hold on to. Say why it's valuable: "Keep running performance tests on every build. They caught a slowdown before release."
- Less of: Things with diminishing value. Something that used to help and has drifted: "Less status reporting in standup."
- More of: Things worth amplifying. Something working that deserves more room: "More swapping of pairing partners, so knowledge spreads."
- Stop doing: Things that hurt more than help. Name the practice and its cost: "Stop the daily status email. Nobody reads it."
- Start doing: Fresh ideas to try. Something new: "Start a short demo for support at the end of each sprint."
When to use it
It suits established teams that want more nuance than Start · Stop · Continue, teams whose retros keep producing the same answers, and teams tuning a process rather than replacing it.
Five arms mean more cards, so give it a full hour. If you're short on time, use Start · Stop · Continue. For the degrees without the clean breaks, Keep · Add · Less · More drops the stop column. For personal reflection, try the 4 Ls.
How to run it
- Set the stage (5 minutes). Explain the arms as a scale from Stop doing to Start doing, and that Less of isn't a polite Stop. Review last retro's actions.
- Write alone (10 minutes). Everyone writes in any of the five arms. Five columns take longer to fill, so give the full ten minutes.
- Group (5 to 10 minutes). Merge duplicates. When one person wrote Less of and another Stop doing about the same practice, put them together: how far to go is the discussion.
- Vote (3 minutes). Spend votes on the topics that matter most. Hidden tallies keep people from following the early leader.
- Discuss (20 to 25 minutes). For each topic, agree where on the scale it belongs: keep it, turn it down, turn it up, or end it.
- Agree actions (5 to 10 minutes). Two or three changes, each with an owner and a due date. Five arms make it tempting to change everything at once. Don't.
- Close (2 minutes). Read back the actions and the Keep doing list.
Tips
- Use the scale. If people can't agree between Stop doing and Less of, try the smaller change first and review it next time.
- Make Less of and More of concrete. "More pairing" is hard to check. "Pair on every change to the payments code" isn't.
- Use Less of for gentle concerns. It lets someone question a practice without seeming to attack whoever introduced it.
Run it in Scrums
Choose New session → Retrospective on your team's page and pick Starfish from the formats. Everyone writes privately, and other people's cards stay face-down until the facilitator reveals them, so nobody's first card sets the tone. Then group similar cards (or let Auto-group cluster them), vote with hidden tallies, and discuss the topics in order, adding action items with an owner and a due date. Open action items come back in the next retro's Review step. Retros are anonymous by default, and Scrums is free.
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Questions
What's the difference between the starfish retrospective and Start Stop Continue?
Starfish keeps Start, Stop and Keep (Continue), and adds Less of and More of in between. That turns three yes-or-no choices into a scale, so the team can adjust a practice instead of only keeping or dropping it.
How long does a starfish retrospective take?
Plan for a full hour. Five arms mean more cards to write, group and discuss than in a three-column format.
Why is it called a starfish?
Because the five categories are drawn as the five arms of a starfish, one category in each arm.