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 briefly explain it to you👆🏽

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 the devil is in the detail (or should I say, the strength?)👀

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

 

Keep: What should we keep doing as before?

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

 

Start (Add): What should we start doing?

✅ Example: You feel 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 information on: “ psychologischer Sicherheit ” or “ Team Health Check in 3 Schritten %E2%80%9C

 

Reduce (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.

 

Improve (More): What should we do more of?

✅ Example: It’s good to look at agile metrics, like 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 Infos zu: “ 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 “drop add keep improve” and the KALM retrospective “keep add less more”. 

But in fact, the devil is in the detail here:

 

Improve vs. More (Improve vs. More)✨

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

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

I personally don’t like meetings. They massively worsen 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. “Less” talking, but saying “More” was the solution for me. 🗣

Of course, there are also things that you should really stop doing. Are you using a tool that doesn’t help the team progress? Drop it.

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

 

Conclusion - KALM Retrospective**⚡**

I don’t know how you see it, but for me, the KALM (Keep Add Less More) retrospective is one of my favorite retrospective formats. It doesn’t have a lot of frills 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 our Echometer tool for continuous improvement of agile teams: