Retrospective Stinger

retrospective-stinger

The retrospective surface end-to-end: choosing the right format, creating the conditions for honesty, facilitating the session, and enforcing follow-through. Built from 2026 research into what makes retros actually change behavior rather than generate a board no one reads.

The most important finding from the research: only 50% of retro action items ever get completed (survey of 419 professionals across 5 countries, 2026-05-15). The format is almost irrelevant if no one does anything differently next sprint. This stinger is calibrated around the follow-through problem, not the facilitation aesthetics problem.

When this stinger applies

Load when retrospective-wasp-drone is invoked. Trigger on:

• "Run a retro" / "plan our retrospective" / "help us do a sprint retrospective"
• "Which retro format should we use?"
• "Our retros produce no change" / "action items never get done" / "retro theater"
• "How do we do an async retro?" / "remote retrospective"
• "We need better psychological safety in our retros"
• "Review last sprint's action items"

Do NOT load for:

• Incident postmortems (different cadence, participants, and root-cause methodology)
• Sprint planning or backlog grooming
• OKR-setting or strategy planning

First action when this stinger is loaded

Read in this order:

1. guides/00-principles.md: the philosophy: retros are behavior-change instruments, not complaint sessions. The output is what the team does differently; measure follow-through rate, not participation.
2. guides/01-formats.md: the format matrix: nine formats with best-for context, time budget, and selection logic.
3. guides/02-psychological-safety.md: the safety gate: Edmondson 7-item scale, the low-safety mitigation playbook, the anonymity bridge technique.

Then walk the remaining guides based on the task:

• Facilitating a session: guides/03-facilitation.md
• Action-item review or capture: guides/04-action-items.md
• Async or remote team: guides/05-async-retro.md

Critical directives

• Never skip the safety pre-check. A retro run without minimum psychological safety produces theater. Surfacing the gap is more valuable than running a polished session. See guides/02-psychological-safety.md.
• Always capture action items with owner and deadline. The five structural failure modes: no owner, no deadline, too large, invisible on the backlog, no accountability loop. See guides/04-action-items.md.
• Open every retro with a follow-through review of the previous retro's actions. Teams that skip this signal that action items are optional. See guides/04-action-items.md.
• Name the format and explain the selection. Teams that understand why a format was chosen are more engaged and can adapt it without the Drone next time. See guides/01-formats.md.
• Frame async as a first-class option, not a fallback. Async retros see 42% higher participation from introverts. See guides/05-async-retro.md.
• Use the 3-question filter during live sessions. Before any action item leaves the board: Who owns this? When does it close? What does done look like? See guides/04-action-items.md.

Folder layout

Copy code
retrospective-stinger/
+- SKILL.md                         (this file — master index)
+- README.md                        (one-page human overview)
+- guides/
|  +- 00-principles.md              (the retro-as-behavior-change philosophy)
|  +- 01-formats.md                 (format matrix: 9 formats with selection logic)
|  +- 02-psychological-safety.md    (Edmondson scale, safety gate, mitigation playbook)
|  +- 03-facilitation.md            (agenda template, time-boxing, synthesis, closing ritual)
|  +- 04-action-items.md            (SMART+, 3-question filter, backlog placement, accountability loop)
|  +- 05-async-retro.md             (4-day timeline, tool options, async facilitation patterns)
+- examples/
|  +- happy-path-retro.md           (end-to-end sync retro with a mid-maturity team)
|  +- async-retro-example.md        (end-to-end async retro for a distributed team)
+- templates/
|  +- action-items.md               (the four-component action item template)
|  +- facilitation-plan.md          (blank agenda the Drone fills in per-retro)
+- reports/
|  +- README.md                     (how retro output files accumulate over time)
+- research/                        (owned by scripture-historian; read-only for this stinger)
   +- research-summary.md
   +- index.md
   +- internal/
   +- external/

Forged by stinger-forge for retrospective-wasp-drone. Part of the Wasp Nest.