Mad-Sad-Glad Retrospective

The Mad-Sad-Glad Retrospective is a retrospective format that provides a simple-to-understand and easy-to-run framework for reflecting on the events of a sprint or period that has just passed. More specifically, this format emphasizes the emotions experienced and felt by team members.

This theme is an excellent workshop for identifying the sources of frustration or dissatisfaction of team members and determining levers for improving team mood. In addition, this workshop is quite helpful in preventing conflicts and reducing team turnover.

More specifically, the workshop invites participants to share their feelings along three axes:

• Mad: What made you angry? What prevented you from working as you would have liked?
• Sad: What made you sad? What disappointed you, and what could be improved?
• Glad: What made you happy? What do you appreciate the most in this project or in your team?

The Mad-Sad-Glad Retrospective generally takes place in 4 stages:

1. Step 1: Individual reflection

   The Facilitator or Scrum Master gives participants 5-10 minutes to reflect on events that have occurred during the sprint or the period that has just passed. Participants are then invited to write down their remarks on stickies.

   To avoid influencing each other, participants must reflect and write down their remarks separately, for example, by using the polling booth mode.

2. Step 2: Commenting and reorganizing ideas

   The facilitator or the Scrum Master reads the participants’ stickies and, if necessary, asks them to clarify their points. It is essential to remove any ambiguity of interpretation for the rest of the workshop.

    

   In addition, the animator groups the stickies that share a similar theme to facilitate the readability of the board.

3. Step 3: Proposal of areas for improvement

   Based on the comments shared in the previous step, the facilitator or the Scrum Master gives the participants 5 minutes to think about suggestions for improvement.

4. Step 4: Selection of areas for improvement

   At the end of step 3, participants are invited to select the three most relevant areas for improvement, for example, running a voting session.

    

   A team member must be designated to supervise each improvement task.

Naya Luceau, a freelance Agile Coach & Scrum Master, has a long experience leading retrospectives within Agile teams. Here, she shares some valuable tips to help you make this unmissable ceremony a success:

• If you only have one hour to devote to the retrospective ceremony instead of two and are looking for a short but effective format, such as the Start-Stop-Continue Retrospective, the Mad-Sad-Glad Retrospective will allow you to quickly make an assessment of the sprint that has just ended and take the temperature of the team’s mood;
• Retrospective formats that only include three categories generally encourage effective discussions;
• One last more general piece of advice: at the start of the retrospective, remind participants that they can talk about everything concerning the team, not only achievements. For example: What annoyed you in your work or the organization? in your daily life? in the life of the team? at the management level? In the development of the product itself? etc.