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ADAPTIVE Retrospectives

Definition

ADAPTIVE is a framework that transforms retrospectives from symbolic ceremonies where problems are raised but not solved into a driver of real team improvement. Rather than a single format, it's an acronym for eight practices great ScrumMasters use to help teams take ownership of their own process:

  • Act on improvements with specificity
  • Diverge before converging (generate multiple alternatives first)
  • Account for follow-through on previous actions
  • Probe for understanding with powerful questions
  • Try something new through experimentation
  • Involve everyone in the conversation
  • Visualize data to guide progress
  • Expose the elephants in the room

In the Book

Geoff Watts addresses a critical failure mode: teams that hold retrospectives repeatedly but never actually improve. They discuss the same problems sprint after sprint. A good ScrumMaster helps teams identify improvements; a great one inspires them to be ADAPTIVE.

The book shows how each practice works in context. For Act, rather than vague commitments like "communicate better," a great ScrumMaster pushes teams to be specific: Who needs to communicate with whom? About what? When? How will we know it's working? Actions get built into the next sprint's backlog in small batches (one to three, not a dozen).

For Diverge, Watts introduces the Rule of Seven: teams don't make decisions until they've generated at least seven alternatives. The first few are sensible; ideas six and seven often seem "crazy" but contain seeds of breakthrough thinking. For Probe, he teaches the ORID structure: ask Objective questions (what happened?), Reflective questions (how did you feel?), Interpretive questions (what does this mean?), then Decisional questions (what will you do?).

The Try practice redefines failure. Watts shares how BT explicitly redefined failure: making the wrong decision is good if done quickly, cheaply, in good faith, and learned from. He describes the "failure bow," where a team member whose experiment failed takes a bow and receives applause for the learning, not the outcome.

Visualize means making progress visible and asking the team what they want to be held accountable for. Expose means bringing hidden team tensions—the "elephants in the room"—into the open courageously but without judgment.

Why It Matters

Most agile teams have retrospectives; few have truly improving teams. This framework shifts retrospectives from a safety valve where frustrations are aired to a structured discipline where the team develops the capability to solve its own problems. It moves ownership from the ScrumMaster ("tell me what to fix") to the team ("we will fix this"). The framework also embeds psychological safety, experimentation, and divergent thinking—practices that correlate with high-performing teams across domains.