Create a discussion per-person, not per-topic?
I was thinking about how we can encourage more participation for the Plan retrospective, and as part of this I thought about how retrospectives go in non-async forms. One way of doing them is to just go round the room, and ask each person directly what they think went well, didn't go well, etc.
We ping people in the async retros, but we don't do this. Instead a couple of formats have evolved:
- A discussion per 'big question', like in gl-retrospectives/plan#22 (closed).
- A discussion per topic, like in gl-retrospectives/create-team#8 (closed).
I think an alternative format could be a discussion per team member. This gives each person an explicit space to mention their own thoughts and feelings. Other people can respond, but they get to set the tone of that thread.
There are probably downsides to this, but it's an idea