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| Criterion |  Agile Sailboat Retrospective |  Agile Starfish Retrospective |  Operations Root Cause Analysis |  Operations Root Cause Tree Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When a team wants to read momentum, brakes, and risks together, it offers an easily understandable picture of the situation. It makes drive, obstacles, and headwind visible in the same picture. | When improvement options need to be sorted more finely than just start and stop, it brings observations into clear kinds of action. This makes visible what should be done more, less, newly, or continued. | When a problem keeps recurring and the cause stays unclear, the method exposes the underlying mechanism. It separates symptom, guess, and robust explanation from one another. | For a problem with several suspected causes, the method builds a causal structure instead of a mere list. It makes visible how causes connect and where the strongest points of leverage lie. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 45-90 min | 45-90 min | 1-4 h | 1-3 h |
Participantsdifferent | 4-12 | 4-12 | 3-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Sailboat Board, Risks, Improvement Actions | Starfish Board, Practice Changes, Experiments | Problem Statement, Cause Hypotheses, Confirmed Causes, Action Plan | Cause Tree, Evidence Notes, Countermeasures |
Tagsno overlap | RetrospectiveTeamImprovement | RetrospectiveImprovementExperimentsTeam | Root causeProblem solvingQualityIncident | Root causeTreeIncidentQuality |