 The Themed Retrospective Handbook. Hi, and welcome to the Themed Retrospective Handbook e-learning course at Front Row Agile. I'm Geoff Watts. And I'm Paul Goddard. And we've put together a set of fun, engaging, and themed templates for retrospective meetings. They can be used off the shelf by scrum masters, agile coaches, or facilitators in order to help teams inspect and adapt their process. As agile coaches ourselves, with 30 years of experience between us, we know how important the retrospective meeting is in terms of development of an agile team. We also know that the most common complaint that we hear associated with retrospectives is that they grow stale or repetitive as the coaches and facilitators quickly run out of ideas of ways of running a retrospective. In this course, you will find 10 retrospective designs that are completely new and that you can use straight away with your team to get that energy and enthusiasm back. Over the years, we've seen and experienced hundreds of retrospectives, and we've noticed many patterns about what makes a retrospective successful. As a result of what we've learned, we wholeheartedly encourage retrospective facilitators to focus on a number of characteristics. First of all, make your retrospectives balanced. Don't just focus on what went wrong or what went well. In our experience, no sprint is ever an unmitigated success, and no sprint is ever an unmitigated failure. The teams that use their retrospectives to simultaneously reinforce the good points of their process and address their weaknesses are by far the most successful teams we've come across. The best retrospectives are also well structured so that the attendees and the facilitator know what they're planning to cover and how they plan to achieve that. Attendees know what to expect before they attend and can come along fully prepared for the meeting and participate. The other characteristic of successful retrospectives that we've noticed is that the best ones are usually focused, and that the topic of conversation is not open-ended in an attempt to address everything in one go, but rather targeted on a particular area of the team's process. For example, communication or motivation or maybe quality. By focusing on a particular area, the team usually has more useful conversations, better insights, and maybe come up with better actions as a result. Bearing these characteristics in mind, each of these retrospectives have been designed to focus on a particular theme, and they all have a particular structure to them, which we're going to explain further in our next short video.