2 tips for the DAKI retrospective incl. examples

You’re an Agile Coach or Scrum Master looking for the “DAKI drop add keep improve retrospective”? Great, then you’ve come to the right place - the DAKI retrospective is one of my personal favorites (I’ll get to that later). But let me briefly explain it👆🏽

First things first: DAKI is a simple acronym for “drop add keep improve” - who would have thought? 😂 All kidding aside. The DAKI retro is one of the more unspectacular retrospectives with its 4 fairly simple questions (but you’ll see, these questions pack a punch).
This is what the retrospective usually looks like on a digital whiteboard or on paper:

<figure> <figcaption><em>Whiteboard Vorlage - DAKI (Drop Add Keep Improve) Retrospektive</em></figcaption> </figure>

As you can see, even the design is kept rather simple. But the devil is in the detail (or should I say, the strength?)👀

Here are some quick examples for all four questions: “Drop? - Add? - Keep? - Improve?”

Omission (Drop): [Optional: Looking at the last sprint / last few weeks] What should we omit?

✅ Example: You weren’t happy with the new tool that was supposed to help with prioritizing & transparency of the Product Backlog. You shouldn’t use it anymore.

Start (Add): What should we start doing?

✅ Example: You have the feeling that not everyone in your team dares to speak up, there is a lack of so-called psychological safety t . So you could start by performing an agile Team Health Check in 3 steps in your team. 👉🏽 More info on: “ psychologischer Sicherheit ” or “ Team Health Check in 3 Schritten %E2%80%9C

Maintain (Keep): What should we continue doing as before?

✅ Example: You changed your Daily and have been asking one more question since the last sprint. That has led to better Dailies, so you should keep it up.

Improve: What should we do more of?

✅ Example: It’s good to look at agile metrics, such as your team’s velocity, from time to time - this hasn’t happened much lately! We should get better at keeping an eye on our metrics.
👉🏽More info on: “ agile Metriken %E2%80%9C

By the way, you can also find this retrospective in our Echometer Tool and conduct it online with your team (without registration)🎉

**&#xA;**Daki Retrospective vs. KALM Retrospective🔍

You may have noticed that at first glance there is no big difference between the DAKI model and the KALM retrospective “keep add less more”. 

But buckle up, because now comes the reason why I would prefer the DAKI retrospective to the KALM retrospective any time.

 

Improve vs. More ✨

At first glance, you might not see the difference here, but as I said, the devil is in the detail.

In my opinion, constant improvement is one of the secrets to personally or as a team “becoming the best version of yourself”. But improvement involves so much more than “doing more of something”.

For example, you can improve in things that are important but not yet as good as you would like them to be. And doing “more” of something is only a tiny fraction of what “improve” includes for me.

And even if the word doesn’t seem that different at first glance - the unconscious processes that take place in you are significantly different. Therefore, “improve” takes home the victory here for me🏆

 

Less vs. Drop (Fewer vs. Omission)��

Now we can take a closer look at “Less vs. Drop”. When was the last time you did less of something and why? For me, it was reducing the amount of time I spent in meetings. 

Because meetings massively degraded my productivity. However, there was a reason why I attended these meetings in the first place: “communication” or “information exchange.” 

In this case, I wanted to spend less time in meetings, but maintain the flow of information within the team. “Less” meetings were not the right way for me - I had to improve the way I exchanged information with my colleagues (improve using the DAKI method)🗣

For me, “less” of something is always a sign that I need to improve in that area. 

My credo: Either I improve at something (in this case, by exchanging the same amount of information in less time) or I drop it altogether. And hey, that’s exactly what this is all about - Less vs. Drop?💡

 

Conclusion - DAKI Retrospective**⚡**

I don’t know how you see it, but for me, the DAKI retrospective (Drop Add Keep Improve) is the clear winner and one of my favourite retrospective formats for reflecting and becoming a better team week after week.

If you like the Daki retrospective, you’ll probably also like this: 54 Retrospectives for beginners and professionals.

Would you like to start your first DAKI retrospective right away? Then try our Echometer tool for continuous improvement of agile teams: