Why Your Team Is Silent in Retrospectives and How to Fix It
Unlike other official Scrum events, the preparation for a retrospective often falls solely on the Scrum Master's shoulders. So when things don’t go in the right direction, we — as facilitators — can feel quite lonely.
Over the years, I’ve facilitated a few retrospectives where team members didn’t know what to say or share to kick off conversations. While these long silences left a negative impression, they also taught me valuable lessons I’d like to share with you in this article.
We’ll explore how to foster a genuine exchange dynamic when your retrospectives seem to lack depth, so each team member finds their voice, and the time spent together creates real added value.
In this article, we’ll cover:
Why teams stay silent in retrospectives and how to address it
To fully understand a problem, it’s essential to identify its root causes. In this section, we’ll examine the most common retrospective antipatterns, drawing inspiration from Aino Vonge Corry’s work and her excellent book Retrospectives Antipatterns.
Lack of Psychological Safety
All agile frameworks agree that trust is a cornerstone for high-performing agile teams. More broadly, psychological safety is equally essential.
Do you feel you can truly be yourself when you enter the room or join the virtual call? Do you feel you have the space to express yourself without being judged by your colleagues?
If not, it’s understandable to hesitate before sharing your views openly. The same goes for your teammates. Even if you gather the courage to speak up, the quality of the dialogue and ensuing exchanges is likely to be impacted by this initial lack of psychological safety. Therefore, as a facilitator, it’s crucial to contribute — just like the team members — to building and maintaining this emotional safety daily.
Below, we’ll explore three ways to re-establish a good level of psychological safety:
To start, creating a climate of mutual respect through the Prime Directive is a solid foundation:
“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.”
- Norman L. Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews
Next, allowing team members to answer certain questions anonymously can encourage greater participation. It can indeed be intimidating to speak openly when the team dynamic isn’t entirely positive.
Finally, normalizing mistakes is a crucial aspect of an agile team’s growth. Mistakes are essential for learning and improvement. When team members fear making mistakes, they will probably avoid taking any risks at all.
Nothing to Discuss
Another issue can arise when the team doesn’t identify any new topics to discuss. Team members may feel that things are going well and that there’s no real need for improvement. As a result, some teams prefer to stay within their comfort zone or, despite good intentions, struggle to find ways to keep progressing.
In Retrospectives Antipatterns, Aino Corry suggests an approach opposite to reflecting on the past — known as a futurespective, which focuses on looking ahead.
While we can’t always predict what tomorrow will bring, it’s still possible for team members to discuss their hopes and concerns for the future. This way, the team can think beyond the past sprint and share their vision for what comes next.
Creating a team radar is also a valuable exercise, allowing members to self-assess on various criteria relevant to their specific context.
This approach provides both quantitative and qualitative data to fuel conversations during retrospectives. By tracking results over time, the radar can be used periodically to measure progress and encourage continuous improvement.
Disengagement
Finally, another common antipattern is when the team arrives at the meeting feeling disengaged. In this particular case, it’s essential to identify whether team members no longer see value in the retrospective itself — because they feel it no longer benefits them — or if there is a broader issue. For example, there may be a misalignment with the company’s values, goals, or direction.
In either case, the team should use the retrospective to communicate their frustrations and ideally come up with conclusions and an action plan to address these issues as much as possible.
But what should be done when the problems identified during the retrospective do not lead to a concrete or realistic action plan? The team may find itself in a deadlock when trying to resolve issues outside its control and leave the retrospective feeling frustrated.
The Circles of Influence (or Circle & Soup, as described in Retrospectives Antipatterns) is an exercise that allows the team to categorize the issues they face based on their ability to address them.
“What makes this activity productive is that it gives the team a realistic perspective of the issues they want to resolve and the scope of their power to address them.”
- Aino Vonge Corry, Retrospectives Antipatterns
This exercise helps them differentiate between items in:
Their Circle of Control: issues they can take direct action on
Their Circle of Influence: issues they can affect indirectly
Their Circle of Concern: issues over which they have no control
In my experience, I’ve often seen teams believe they have little or no control over certain issues, only to later identify and resolve them. As a facilitator, it’s important to support the team by coaching them through this approach to reduce friction.
Source: positivepsychology- Circles of influence
As you can see, across these various antipatterns, it is crucial to accurately identify the root cause of the problems encountered in retrospectives to understand how to facilitate smoother exchanges during these sessions.
In the next section, we’ll explore some pitfalls that I wish I had avoided throughout my career as a facilitator.
3 Mistakes I Made in the Past
Over the years, I have made several mistakes in how I approached the antipatterns mentioned above. Whether due to a lack of knowledge on the subject or simply a misguided strategic direction, it’s possible you’ve experienced the same. The key is to avoid letting the same patterns repeat too often.
In this section, I will share my biggest mistakes so that you don’t make them as well.
Forcing Fun
When I had just begun working with a new team, they did not see the value in continuing retrospectives. My first instinct was to explain the theoretical benefits of this meeting to them. During my first retrospective with the team, I managed to gather some clues and initiate discussions that could help us move forward into the next sprint. However, during the next retrospective, the same issue resurfaced, and the team still seemed stuck.
Naively, I assumed that if we had fun, the team members would want to attend the retrospective, and that my icebreaker activity would help facilitate conversations afterward. While icebreakers are important for starting the meeting on a positive note, they do not address the underlying problem. The result was striking: the retrospective lasted only 20 minutes, with more than half of that time spent on the icebreaker activity.
As a consequence, team members likely felt that they weren’t being fully heard, which set us back.
A better approach would have been to conduct a retrospective-on-the-retrospective, allowing the team to explain why they felt they were wasting their time during this event. This way, I could have based our discussions on factual information rather than assumptions.
Overcomplicating Discussions
When discussions are rare, there may be a tendency to latch onto the few post-its or comments from the team and dig deeply into them. Sometimes this is a good approach, but other times it is not.
I remember a Customer Relations team that had a lot of trouble starting conversations during retrospectives. As a facilitator, I dove headfirst into the few items present on the board, trying to elaborate on them.
The problem was that I didn’t consider why the exchanges were so difficult to obtain; objectively, the team was facing many challenges. It quickly became clear that the discussions were going nowhere — my team had no answers when I asked them to elaborate.
I decided to restart the conversation by simply asking them what the clients thought of their work and the value they provided. Their faces brightened, and we ended up having a productive and open retrospective. The reality was that the team members had no idea what the users thought, felt, or did on a daily basis. Consequently, they were unable to discuss this information later to make improvements. When the feedback loop is broken (or nonexistent), it becomes very challenging to improve.
Giving Up
In the face of a silent team, the facilitator of the retrospective often finds themselves alone in trying to steer the meeting in a positive direction.
I must admit, there have been times when I gave up and accepted that the team simply didn’t want to be present — either physically or mentally. Instead of addressing the elephant in the room, I let the members disengage from the meeting. After all, we were discussing their ability to deliver value, not mine, right?
I thought I could provoke them by saying they could disconnect from our virtual meeting if they wanted to, not realizing that they would actually do it. Big mistake! I found myself alone within seconds.
There is ALWAYS a path to take, a lever to pull, a question to ask to spark conversations. Even if the team is at an advanced level of agile maturity, you can guide them toward less traditional exercises or activity formats to reignite their enthusiasm.
From my experience, many teams enjoy stepping off the beaten path in their retrospective format. This allows them to challenge their emerging judgments about retrospectives — and, more importantly, about agility in general.
The opportunities for improvement are endless! The art of self-organization, agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, etc.), development practices (XP, DevOps), and the values and practices associated with these methods — everything can be a topic for discussion. There is a vast ocean of possible learning opportunities, so let’s go beyond a simple “How was the last sprint?” Your teams will thank you sooner or later!
Once we find the next learning opportunity, the virtuous circle begins to take shape again.
How Neatro can turn silence into conversation
Although it may be tempting to take the easy way out, remember that the role of a facilitator is to maximize the value of a meeting, especially during retrospectives. Your approach will be key to the success of the meeting, so hold firm and don’t forget that behind every mistake lies an opportunity for learning.
Speaking of performance retrospectives — for several years now, Neatro has been making my life much easier and saving me preparation time, thanks to the templates available, which I simply select according to the context of the team I’m working with.
If you’d like to learn more, take a look at the Neatro retrospective experience. Launch a Neatro presentation demo here.
And if you’d rather take immediate action, start using Neatro for free here.