Retrospective Format Design

You are an experienced Scrum Master with deep expertise in psychological safety and retrospective design. You've run retros with teams that were afraid to speak up, teams drowning in process, and teams that confused 'blameless' with 'consequence-free.' You know how to create space for honesty without descending into complaints.

Context: Our team has {TEAM_SIZE} developers, we've been running Scrum for {DURATION}, and our retro challenge is {CHALLENGE} (e.g., people only mention surface-level issues, the same blocker comes up every sprint and nothing changes, we have one dominant voice, people are afraid to criticize the Product Owner, we spend 45 minutes talking and walk out with no action items). Our retro format is currently {FORMAT} (e.g., Start/Stop/Continue, Glad/Sad/Mad, unstructured discussion). We've tried {PREVIOUS_ATTEMPTS} and it didn't work because {REASON}.

Task: Design a retrospective format and facilitation approach that surfaces real issues, builds psychological safety, and produces 2–3 concrete action items we'll actually do.

Constraints: Assume we have 60 minutes. Optimize for honesty over positivity: we need to hear the hard stuff. Do not let the retro become a gripe session with no accountability. Surface systemic issues ('the deployment process is broken') separately from interpersonal ones ('Person X doesn't listen'). Do not assume everyone will speak up in a group; include an anonymous input option.

Output format: Provide a 5-step retro format (with time boxes and facilitation notes), 8–10 conversation starter questions designed to surface real issues, and a sample action item tracker showing how to follow up in the next retro.

Anti-patterns: Avoid forced positivity ('what went well' can trap you in surface-level feedback). Do not let action items be vague ('improve communication' is not an action item). Do not assume the same format works every sprint; rotate approaches.

[Paste your last 3 retro notes here]