KALM Retrospective incl. example

You are looking for the “KALM Keep Add Less More Retrospective” for your agile team? Great, then you’ve come to the right place - Let me explain it briefly 👆🏽

First things first: KALM is a simple acronym for “Keep Add Less More” - Who would have thought? 😂 The KALM retro is known for its simplicity and effectiveness.
This is what the retrospective usually looks like on a digital whiteboard or on paper:

<figure> <figcaption><em>Whiteboard Vorlage - KALM (Keep Add Less More) Retrospektive</em></figcaption> </figure>

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

Here are some short examples for all four questions: “Keep? - Add? - Less? - More?”

 

Keep: What should we do as before?

✅Example: You changed your daily, asking only one question. This produced better results, so you should keep it.

 

Add: What should we start with?

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

 

Less: What should we do less of?

✅ Example: You were not satisfied with the amount of meetings you held and other activities were neglected. You should hold fewer / only the most important meetings.

 

More: 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 metrics %E2%80%9C

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 “drop add keep improve” and the KALM retrospective “keep add less more”. 

But the devil is in the detail:

 

Improve vs. More✨

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

For me, the difference here is that you can do more of something but keep the quality (we should talk to each other more) or get better at something and keep the quantity (we should talk to each other better/nicer).

And even if the word doesn’t seem that different at first glance - the unconscious processes that take place in you differ considerably. In the best case, you ask yourself both questions from time to time. What should you improve? What should you do more of? Because with this combination you will become the winner.🏆

 

Less vs. Drop

Now we can take a closer look at “Less vs. Drop”. 

Personally, I don’t like meetings. They massively reduce my productivity. But not talking (drop) is of course not an option in a team.

In this case, I wanted to spend less time in meetings, but maintain the flow of information in the team. Speaking “Less” but saying “More” was the solution for me here. 🗣

Of course, there are also things that you really shouldn’t do. Are you using a tool that doesn’t help the team? Drop it!

As you can see, the devil is in the detail here too.💡

 

Conclusion - KALM Retrospective⚡

I don’t know about you, but for me, the KALM (Keep Add Less More) retrospective is one of my favorite retrospective formats. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles and fulfills the purpose of a good retro.

If you like the KALM retrospective, you’ll probably like this too: 54 retrospectives for beginners and professionals.

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