Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill every board, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Field app squad at Fieldnote, retro number 9. The team keeps running Start / Stop / Continue and keeps producing the same three actions, so Karim swaps the format for one session.
What the team took away
The two changes came from the middle columns, which the three-column format had been burying in Continue: pairing booked at planning rather than improvised, two slots a sprint, and field visits set at one per person per month. Three actions with owners, checked at retro 10.
How to run it
Preparation
The delivery team only, and a team that has already run a few retros. A first retro is better served by Start / Stop / Continue: five columns dilute a group that has not got the habit yet.
Five columns, left to right, in that order: Stop doing, Less of, Keep doing, More of, Start doing. The order is the point, it reads as a dial from less to more.
Post last retro's three actions on the board before people arrive, marked done or not done.
One sticky colour per person, not per column. You want to see who is silent.
Agenda
5 min
Last actions Read the three actions from last time. Done or not. If one was missed twice, drop it out loud and say why.
12 min
Silent writing Everyone writes in the five columns, in silence. At least one sticky in Less of and one in More of, those are the two columns people skip.
15 min
Read and cluster Each person reads their own stickies in one breath, no debate. Cluster duplicates as you go.
5 min
Vote Three dots each, on the four action columns. Keep doing is not voted on, it is the thank-you column.
15 min
Set the dial For each top cluster in Less of and More of, make it a quantity. 'More field visits' becomes 'one per person per month'. A dose without a number is a wish, and it comes back at the next retro unchanged.
18 min
Three actions The three highest clusters become three actions, each with an owner and a date before the next retro. Write them in the team channel during the session.
5 min
One word One word each on how the retro itself felt. If 'long' comes up twice, go back to three columns next time.
Pitfalls
Do not turn a Keep doing sticky into an action. That column exists so the team notices what it would miss, not to create work.
Do not accept 'more of' or 'less of' without a number, a frequency or a threshold. Undosed, it is indistinguishable from Continue, which is exactly the problem this format solves.
If everything lands in Start doing, the team is avoiding what it already has. Close that column and run the middle three again.
Five columns and three actions, not five actions. The extra columns buy precision, not volume.
Afterwards
The three actions open the next retro. If the same Less of comes back three retros running, it is not a team habit, it is a constraint from outside: escalate it or run a Team Health Monitor.