Agile Facilitation method

Starfish Retrospective

Shows which practices should be preserved, increased, reduced, stopped, or tried anew.

The Starfish Retrospective distinguishes five changes to practices: Keep Doing, Less Of, More Of, Stop Doing and Start Doing. Preserving, adjusting intensity, ending and trying something new remain distinct decisions.

Core question

Which practices should we preserve, increase, reduce, stop or start trying?

Plan Method guide

Start comparison

Give feedbackIs this method useful to you?

Participants: 4-12 participants
Time: 45–75 minutes; later experiment review

Paper illustration for Starfish Retrospective

Five directions
Five directions of change
Set the period and explain Keep, Less, More, Stop and Start using a practice.
Practice list
Collect practices silently
Independently record concrete practices and place them in the desired change category.
Disagreements
Understand disagreements
Clarify related cards and explicitly discuss conflicting change requests.
Adjustment
Test a defined adjustment
Select a feasible practice change with specific extent and expected effect.

Test a selected change in the next work period; at review decide its intensity or continuation using observed effects.

A good fit when

For teams wanting nuanced changes to working practices rather than merely collecting positives and negatives.

Ideal for

Continuous Improvement
Mature Teams
Practice Tuning

Not good for

Very new teams without shared experience
Acute conflict resolution

Outputs

Five practice directions
Five differentiated practice lists and an agreed experiment with baseline, intended intensity, owner and review.
Practice experiment with review
The practice experiment records an owner, duration, later review signal, and explicit protection for Keep practices.

Starfish Retrospective· worksheet

Fictional example

Keep Doing

Which practice should remain as it is, and why?

Fictional: keep the Friday demo with real usage cases; it clarifies misunderstandings.

Less Of

Which existing practice should become less frequent or smaller?

Limit status meetings to 15 rather than 30 minutes.

More Of

Which helpful existing practice should become more frequent or intensive?

Increase pairing on unfamiliar modules from once to twice weekly.

Stop Doing

Which practice should stop and which necessary function must still be covered?

Stop the duplicate email status report; the current board remains the information source.

Start Doing

Which currently absent practice do we want to try?

Start a weekly 20-minute review of support patterns.

Selected experiment

Which single change is tested for how long, by whom and using which effect?

Two weeks of shorter status meetings, owner Lea; observe duration and subsequent clarifications. Then decide whether to continue.

All example details are fictional and illustrate the application.

Patrick Kua: The Retrospective Starfish

First step

Define period, team boundary and previous experiments; explain the five categories and request concrete practices.

Open the method guide

Where to go next?

Agile

Working Agreements

Anchors the chosen practice change as a binding rule.

Operations

Kaizen Event

Implements the chosen practice experiment in a focused improvement workshop.

Deep dive

Purpose

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.

How it works

It distributes feedback across five response patterns and produces concrete change options from it. The additional gradation between More, Less, and Keep prevents sensible routines from appearing only as continue or end.

In detail

Starfish works because it distinguishes behavior more finely than a pure continue-or-stop logic. Good application uses the middle ground between more of this, less of this, keep, start, and stop to make nuances in everyday team life visible. This gradation in particular helps avoid overreactions and dose change so it stays realistically connectable in the next cycle.

Facilitation

Introduce the five areas briefly using real behavioral examples, so entries don't feel arbitrary. The work is most productive where a point wavers between two fields and thereby demands a finer decision. Close with a few deliberately graded changes rather than a long list of measures.

The method guide walks execution through 4 phases, timing, 4 pitfalls, and clear stop criteria.

Open method guide

Your perspective

Does this method help with your work?

Your feedback helps shape the next improvements to methodatlas.

Sources and topics

Topics

Retrospective Improvement Experiments Team

Sources

Patrick Kua: The Retrospective Starfishthekua.comOriginal 2006 article on the five categories. Experiment planning and example are editorial.

Artifact templates

Starfish Retrospective: WorksheetDefine period, team boundary and previous experiments; explain the five categories and request concrete practices.

markdown

starfish-retrospective-working-template.md

Define period, team boundary and previous experiments; explain the five categories and request concrete practices.

Starfish Retrospective: Worksheet

Question

To be confirmed

Desired outcome

To be confirmed

Scope

Complete retrospective Time: 45–75 minutes; later experiment review

Complete this worksheet on paper or in your own document during the work.

Preparation for this scope

Method setup

Materials: Five fields labelled Keep Doing, Less Of, More Of, Stop Doing, Start Doing; cards and experiment log.
Roles: Team members with different perspectives and a facilitator.
Advance information: Define period, team boundary and previous experiments; explain the five categories and request concrete practices.
Overall time needed: 45–75 minutes; later experiment review
Setup: Lay out five equal practice fields; provide a separate area for the change selected later.