retrospective-stinger

name

retrospective-stinger

description

Equips retrospective-worker-bee to run retrospectives that actually change behavior: format selection (Start/Stop/Continue, 4Ls, sailboat, mad/sad/glad, DAKI, Starfish, and more), psychological safety pre-check (Edmondson scale), facilitation playbooks, async retro design, and action-item follow-through discipline. Use when the user says \\\"run a retro\\\", \\\"plan our retrospective\\\", \\\"which retro format should we use\\\", \\\"our retros produce no change\\\", \\\"help with action items from the retro\\\", \\\"how do we do an async retro\\\", or \\\"our team needs better retrospectives\\\". Do NOT use for incident postmortems (different cadence and audience), sprint planning, OKR-setting, or daily standup facilitation.

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-worker-bee 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