Once we move beyond the normal “What Worked Well / What Didn’t / What Can We Improve” retrospectives, there’s a whole world of interesting activities to engage and focus participants – and it’s growing fast :D

These sites provide a good starting point:

Retrospective Wiki: Retrospective Plans
This section of the wiki includes quite a few complete retrospective plans such as 6 Thinking Hats; Everyday Retrospective; ‘Start / Stop / Continue / More of / Less of’ Wheel. Even if you don’t use the plans in their entirety, they give a good idea of how to structure a retrospective, from activities to timing. I like this whole site – it’s worth looking through.

Extract from Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great
This PDF extract of Esther Derby and Diana Larson’s classic, kindly provided by the publishers The Pragmatic Bookshelf, includes the following games: Timeline, Triple Nickels, Team Radar, Force Field Analysis, Fishbone.

Partnerships and Possibilities
Diana Larsen and Sharon Buckmaster’s blog, containing a variety of agile writings. Filter on Retrospectives for quite a long list of activities – either blogged or linked to other blogs. I particularly like Circles and Soup, as well as the Appreciative Retrospective – I’ve used both ;-)

vinylbaustein
Thorsten O. Kalnin invents really interesting creative retrospectives. Try Agile Speed Dating, Agile Olympics (Golf, Tennis and Bowling have been added so far), or the irresistible StrategicPlay® simulations using Lego.

Gamestorming Games Wiki
This site is has a variety of facilitation games, and is more of a general facilitation resource, but I’ve used some activities in retrospectives to great effect. It’s a particularly useful site if you’re looking for ‘out of the box’ ideas.
I strongly recommend purchasing the Gamestorming book – it’s a fabulous resource to have on hand to flip through when you’re looking for inspiration.

Other links:

This conversation on the LinkedIn Certified ScrumMasters Group: Creative ways of conducting retrospectives has some interesting ideas from contributors.