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| Criterion | ![]() Agile Sprint Retrospective | ![]() Operations After-Action Review | ![]() Agile Starfish Retrospective | ![]() Operations Learning Review |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When a sprint is over and friction shouldn't simply be carried forward, it opens the view onto collaboration and patterns. It creates space to see causes and changes together. | After missions or project phases with unclear outcomes, the method makes visible what actually happened and what can be learned from it. It separates course, effect, and causes so experience turns into solid improvement. | 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. | After a project phase with mixed results, the method makes learning from the individual case reusable. It connects events, decisions, and systemic conditions into robust insights. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | Up to 3 hours for a one-month Sprint; shorter Sprints are usually shorter | 20-45 min | 45-90 min | 1-3 h |
Participantsdifferent | Scrum Team | 3-12 | 4-12 | 3-10 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Improvement actions, Team agreements | Lessons learned, Action items, Event summary | Starfish Board, Practice Changes, Experiments | Learning Review Notes, System Factors, Improvement Actions |
Tagsno overlap | RetrospectiveImprovementLearning | LearningOperationsImprovement | RetrospectiveImprovementExperimentsTeam | LearningRetrospectiveIncidentOperations |



