Starfish Retrospective
The Starfish gives the team five degrees of nuance instead of a simple good-or-bad split. Across keep doing, more of, less of, start doing and stop doing, participants fine-tune their practices rather than just label them. This granularity is especially useful for mature teams that want to adjust what already works rather than overhaul everything.
A cost-effective way of learning about the opinions and concerns of employees, the Starfish retrospective was developed by Patrick Kua to help teams better understand what they did wrong and how to improve. The main purpose is to evaluate which operations and activities need more resources and which ones need less in order to improve business results.
Categories:
- Keep Doing: Operations and activities that are adding value to the organization
- Less Of: Practices that could be improved
- More of: Activities that could be more widely adopted for better results
- Stop Doing: Activities that are not adding value and should be stopped
- Start Doing: New practices that could add value to the organization
How to run a Starfish meeting:
- Create a starfish diagram with each category as one of its arms
- Ask employees to fill in each arm with their opinions
- Give 2-3 minutes to each employee to read out their ideas
- Allow for an open discussion of about 10 minutes for each category
- Design a strategy to effectively implement the discussed points
- Appoint competent personnel to oversee implementation
- Check on activities deemed harmful to the business to make sure they are being let go of
The starfish meeting is adjourned with a positive vibe as it starts with negative topics and ends with new strategies being implemented. This motivates employees and encourages their loyalty to the organization, resulting in long-term benefits for the firm.
