---
name: "retrospective-stinger"
license: AGPL-3.0-or-later
description: "Facilitate engineering retrospectives. Use for format selection, safety pre-check, facilitation, or action-item follow-through. Read README.md for the guide map."
---

# retrospective-stinger

The retrospective surface end-to-end: choosing the right format, creating the conditions for honesty, facilitating the session, and enforcing follow-through. Built from 2026 research into what makes retros actually change behavior rather than generate a board no one reads.

The most important finding from the research: **only 50% of retro action items ever get completed** (survey of 419 professionals across 5 countries, 2026-05-15). The format is almost irrelevant if no one does anything differently next sprint. This stinger is calibrated around the follow-through problem, not the facilitation aesthetics problem.

## When this stinger applies

Load when `retrospective-wasp-drone` is invoked. Trigger on:

- "Run a retro" / "plan our retrospective" / "help us do a sprint retrospective"
- "Which retro format should we use?"
- "Our retros produce no change" / "action items never get done" / "retro theater"
- "How do we do an async retro?" / "remote retrospective"
- "We need better psychological safety in our retros"
- "Review last sprint's action items"

Do NOT load for:

- Incident postmortems (different cadence, participants, and root-cause methodology)
- Sprint planning or backlog grooming
- OKR-setting or strategy planning

## First action when this stinger is loaded

Read in this order:

1. `guides/00-principles.md`: the philosophy: retros are behavior-change instruments, not complaint sessions. The output is what the team does differently; measure follow-through rate, not participation.
2. `guides/01-formats.md`: the format matrix: nine formats with best-for context, time budget, and selection logic.
3. `guides/02-psychological-safety.md`: the safety gate: Edmondson 7-item scale, the low-safety mitigation playbook, the anonymity bridge technique.

Then walk the remaining guides based on the task:
- Facilitating a session: `guides/03-facilitation.md`
- Action-item review or capture: `guides/04-action-items.md`
- Async or remote team: `guides/05-async-retro.md`

## Critical directives

- **Never skip the safety pre-check.** A retro run without minimum psychological safety produces theater. Surfacing the gap is more valuable than running a polished session. See `guides/02-psychological-safety.md`.
- **Always capture action items with owner and deadline.** The five structural failure modes: no owner, no deadline, too large, invisible on the backlog, no accountability loop. See `guides/04-action-items.md`.
- **Open every retro with a follow-through review of the previous retro's actions.** Teams that skip this signal that action items are optional. See `guides/04-action-items.md`.
- **Name the format and explain the selection.** Teams that understand why a format was chosen are more engaged and can adapt it without the Drone next time. See `guides/01-formats.md`.
- **Frame async as a first-class option, not a fallback.** Async retros see 42% higher participation from introverts. See `guides/05-async-retro.md`.
- **Use the 3-question filter during live sessions.** Before any action item leaves the board: Who owns this? When does it close? What does done look like? See `guides/04-action-items.md`.

## Folder layout

```
retrospective-stinger/
+- SKILL.md                         (this file — master index)
+- README.md                        (one-page human overview)
+- guides/
|  +- 00-principles.md              (the retro-as-behavior-change philosophy)
|  +- 01-formats.md                 (format matrix: 9 formats with selection logic)
|  +- 02-psychological-safety.md    (Edmondson scale, safety gate, mitigation playbook)
|  +- 03-facilitation.md            (agenda template, time-boxing, synthesis, closing ritual)
|  +- 04-action-items.md            (SMART+, 3-question filter, backlog placement, accountability loop)
|  +- 05-async-retro.md             (4-day timeline, tool options, async facilitation patterns)
+- examples/
|  +- happy-path-retro.md           (end-to-end sync retro with a mid-maturity team)
|  +- async-retro-example.md        (end-to-end async retro for a distributed team)
+- templates/
|  +- action-items.md               (the four-component action item template)
|  +- facilitation-plan.md          (blank agenda the Drone fills in per-retro)
+- reports/
|  +- README.md                     (how retro output files accumulate over time)
+- research/                        (owned by scripture-historian; read-only for this stinger)
   +- research-summary.md
   +- index.md
   +- internal/
   +- external/
```

---

*Forged by `stinger-forge` for `retrospective-wasp-drone`. Part of the Wasp Nest.*