All-Hands Meetings
Most retro formats break above twenty-five people. Run Two Truths and a Lie at an all-hands and you'll watch ninety people stare at their cameras.
Why this matters
All-hands is a different facilitation problem from a team meeting and the failure mode is reusing the small-group format suite. Personal Map, Draw the Team, Two Truths and a Lie, even the verbal round-robin — they were designed for ten people and they fail at a hundred. The honest scale break is around twenty-five; above it, the formats that survive are the ones that don't require everyone to take a verbal turn. The page's job here is the diagnostic, not the inspiration list.
Recommended activities
Plus / Delta
A five-minute closer for a one-hour meeting. Not a sprint retro.
Dot Voting
Three dots, vote silently, the senior person votes last. Anything else is a popularity contest with a sticker budget.
Lean Coffee
The retrospective for when you have more topics than time. The timer is the format.
One-Word Check-In
The cheapest diagnostic that exists. Treat the word as data, not warm-up.
Temperature Check
A barometer with a half-life. Anonymous extends the runway; rotating the question keeps it sharp.
Appreciations (Kudos)
Specific or skip. 'Thanks for being awesome' is worse than silence.
How to run it
Open with Temperature Check — anonymous, numeric, scales to any room size and gives you a single readable number. For the agenda-emergent part of the meeting, Lean Coffee scales by parallel-kanban: split into rooms, run separate kanbans, debrief the top item from each — the standard 'Lean Coffee only works under ten people' framing is wrong if you split. Use Dot Voting (digital, anonymous) to prioritise topics across the whole group. Close with Plus/Delta — five minutes, no document needed at this scale, the act of voicing the deltas does the work. Skip One-Word Check-In above thirty people unless you have a tool that aggregates words into a cloud; one-by-one rounds collapse. Skip every personal-disclosure format. Bring back Appreciations only when something specific is being marked — a launch, a leaver — not as a default closer.