Starfish Retrospective
Most process problems are dosage problems. Starfish is the retro that admits it.
Five arms — Keep, Stop, Start, More of, Less of. Patrick Kua's extension of Start/Stop/Continue adds the two columns SSC lacks: dials. Stop and Start are switches — do the thing or don't. More of and Less of catch the practices that exist, work, and run at the wrong dose. Which is most of them.
When to use
A team a few quarters into an SSC habit whose Stop column keeps collecting cards that really mean 'less' — that's the format running out of resolution. Sprint or end-of-quarter cadence, established process, dosage complaints: too many meetings, not enough pairing, too much WIP. Skip it on a brand-new team — nothing has a dose to adjust yet; run SSC until it does. Skip it post-incident; dials don't answer 'why did this break.' Run Five Whys or a Fishbone for that.
How it runs
Draw the star
Five wedges: Keep, More of, Less of, Stop, Start. Write the sorting rule under the labels — exists at the right dose: Keep. Exists at the wrong dose: More of or Less of. Shouldn't exist: Stop. Doesn't exist yet: Start.
Silent write, all five arms
Eight minutes. The rule on the wall does the filing — nobody asks 'is this a Stop or a Less of' out loud during the write. File it either way; adjudicate at read-out.
Read in dosage order
Keep first and fast — two minutes of grounding. Then More of, Less of, Stop. Start goes last: teams that open with Start fill next sprint with new process before the board shows what time they've freed.
Vote on the friction arms
Dots on Less of and Stop only. More of cards are cheap — the practice already proved itself, so scaling it needs a calendar, not a ballot.
Commit to one dial and one switch
One Less of or Stop commitment, at most one Start. Named owner and a deadline on each before the room empties, or the star is a drawing.
Why it works
Start/Stop/Continue hands you a switch for every problem: do the thing or don't. Most process problems aren't switch problems. Standup is useful and too long. Pairing works and happens twice a month. Code review catches real bugs and takes three days. SSC forces those into Stop cards nobody means or Continue cards that change nothing; Starfish gives them a dial. The side effect is earlier warning — 'Less of' is cheap to write, so friction surfaces while it's still a dosage problem instead of eighteen months later as a Stop.
Variations
- Dials only — More of and Less of as a 20-minute mid-quarter tune-up when nothing is broken but everything feels slightly off.
- KALM — Starfish's descendant with the Stop arm removed and Start renamed Add. Run it when the team isn't ready to kill anything out loud; come back when they are.
- Collapse to SSC. If the dials come back empty two retros running, the team doesn't have dosage problems — drop the extra arms without ceremony.
Facilitator notes
The rule is the facilitation. Every boundary dispute is a ten-second call: would halving the thing fix it? Less of. Would half still be too much? Stop. Then watch the board shape — an empty Stop arm next to a crowded Less of means the team is flinching, running KALM with extra steps. Take the Less of card with the most dots and ask what it would say if it were honest. House rule stands: the senior person writes last and reads last.
Pitfalls
- Taxonomy debates. Whether a card is Stop or Less of is a ten-second call, not a discussion — apply the halving test and move on.
- Five equal timeboxes. Keep is a two-minute column; Less of and Stop are the meeting.
- Opening with Start. New practices come last, after the board shows what time you've freed.
- Running it on a new team. Starfish tunes existing practices — a team without established habits has nothing to dose. Run SSC for the first quarter.
Remote tips
Five columns is one too many for a shared 13-inch screen — stack them and scroll, or zoom one arm at a time at read-out. Put the sorting rule in each column header ('exists, wrong dose') so async writers self-file, open the board 24 hours before the call, and the Less of arm fills overnight the way every friction column does.
Example outputs
- More of: pairing on anything over five points. Twice last sprint, both under estimate — make it the default.
- Less of: standup. Nine people, twenty-five minutes. Cut the status reads, keep the blockers.
- Stop: the Friday release freeze. It doesn't reduce deploy risk, it batches it into Monday.
- Start: a one-page decision log. We re-litigated the queue-vs-stream call three times this quarter.
FAQ
- Should I run Starfish or Start/Stop/Continue?
- Watch your SSC retro. If Stop cards keep getting walked back — 'well, not stop exactly, just less' — the team is asking for the dials; switch to Starfish. If More of and Less of come back empty two Starfish retros running, switch back. You're an SSC team, and the extra arms are sorting overhead.
- How is Starfish different from KALM?
- KALM is Starfish's descendant with the Stop arm amputated: Keep, Add (Start renamed), Less, More — no Stop. KALM softens the format for teams that can't say Stop yet; Starfish keeps the kill switch. Fragile or new-formed team: KALM. Team that can name a dead practice out loud: Starfish.
- How long does it take? Five columns sounds like a long meeting.
- 45 minutes for four to twelve people. The extra arms add sorting, not discussion — filing a card against the rule takes ten seconds. If it's running to 90, you're debating taxonomy; read the rule out and move on.