It can be difficult to get team members to be vocal in retrospectives. I’m always wary of the stronger personalities controlling the conversation, and I’ve found that going around the room calling people out by name can have mixed results. After reading a recent article on effective retrospective formats, I decided to write my experience with finding every voice.

Step 1 – Red & Green. Distribute 2 colors of post-its and a sharpie to each team member. Explain how we are going to use the next 10min to write independently. I recommend starting simple with red & green, and also having a legend on the whiteboard to help people remember which is which. You’d be surprised how quickly they forget! Use the green post-its to write down what helped the team during the iteration, and the red post-its for what hindered them.

Step 2 – Every Voice. Go around the room and allocate 3-5min for each team member to stand up and discuss their post-its. Have the team members listen while the post-its are stuck up on the whiteboard 1-by-1. It’ll look a bit unorganized at first, but after the 2nd or 3rd person you should begin to recognize common threads throughout the conversations.

Step 3 – Group Organization. Have the entire team come up to the board and categorize the post-its into themes. This is important because it is a group exercise, rather than having the facilitator do it by himself.

After the team comes to a general consensus, have them sit down and talk about the groupings. It should be easy to visually recognize the trouble areas, as they are most likely in red post-it clusters. I recommend starting the conversation with those and ending with the green collections. Be certain to call out action items as needed throughout the discussion.

Feel free to customize this format as you see fit. You can spice it up with an egg timer to denote the end of the writing exercise, or add new colors for ideas that do not fall into the helped or hindered buckets. Be aware that the less vocal team members may write very little at first.

In the end, it isn’t important that you stick to a script, but instead ensure that each and every voice is heard.