The Good The Bad and The Ugly movie retrospective Archives

Johann Botha: Coaching for Accountability, How Scrum Masters Can Foster Self-Managing Teams

Success for a Scrum Master goes beyond just following Scrum rules; it’s about nurturing a team’s belief in itself. Johann explores the delicate balance Scrum Masters must maintain between authority and influence, and why transparency and accountability are key. How can Scrum Masters help teams embrace self-management and foster a sense of belonging? Johann shares insights on how to be a coach, a counselor, and a champion for team autonomy.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Johann prefers retrospectives that go beyond surface-level discussions. His favorite format, “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly,” focuses on identifying real issues and experimenting with solutions. Why is it crucial to dig deeper in retrospectives, and how can techniques like the double diamond design thinking process aid in root cause analysis? Johann explains how teams can drive continuous improvement through thoughtful reflection and experimentation.

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About Johann Botha

Johann joins us from South Africa, helping build digital-age capabilities by developing practical skills to solve problems, grow people, and facilitate difficult change. A long-time proponent of Lean and Agile, Johann consults, coaches, speaks, and writes on the topic. He is also the chief examiner for the EXIN Agile Scrum product.

You can link with Johann Botha on LinkedIn and connect with Johann Botha on Twitter.

Ali Asl: Simple Agile Retrospective formats to help drive conversations

Ali’s focus, as a Scrum Master, is to get the team to be autonomous, and run their own Sprints. In Ali’s opinion, a good team can self organize and self manage, and he uses that as his own success measure. In this segment, we refer to #NoEstimates.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Simple formats to help drive conversations

Although Ali uses many different retrospective formats, he likes the simpler formats like Mad/Sad/Glad or the Good/Bad/Ugly movie retrospective. He likes the simplicity of the 3 categories, which helps him focus on asking probing questions. In this segment, we refer to the Prime Directive of Agile Retrospectives.

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About Ali Asl

Ali is an experienced and accomplished Independent Agile Coach, Trainer and Scrum Master focused on supporting organizations and teams in the application of Agile values and principles to deliver quality and value.

You can link with Ali Asl on LinkedIn.

Erik de Bos: The difficulty of defining a metric for Scrum Master success

“We adopt Agile because the world is complex” is Erik’s statement, as he starts to define success for Scrum Masters. He describes for us the challenges of “assessing” or measuring success and suggests that we start with defining our own goals, and make small experiments that we evaluate for impact. In the end, measurement is just a tool, and we need to pay attention to the teams and to ourselves possibly “gaming” the metric we choose.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Liberating Structures and the movie retrospective

Although Erik does not have a single format he prefers, he often looks into Liberating Structures for inspiration, and uses some “fun” formats (like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly movie retrospective) to help the team relax and start the conversation. He also favors the use of a simple ice breaker (e.g. what’s your favorite movie?) to get the retrospective started.

About Erik de Bos

Erik is what you get when you take a trained scientist, who mastered Agile as a programmer and is now a Scrum Master. A pragmatic, analytic, systemic and critical personality who is completely focused on understanding the problem. Because once you understand the problem, the solution is easy.

You can link with Erik de Bos on LinkedIn and read Erik de Bos’ articles in Medium.