🦫 Beaver Tail Bonanza
Welcome to the Beaver Tail Bonanza! Just like busy beavers building their dams, let's reflect on how we can strengthen our team's workflow—laying new branches, clearing old logs, and maintaining what works. Let's engineer progress together!
Template Columns
🌱 New Branches to Start
Suggest fresh ideas and actions our beaver crew should start building into our workflow.
Base column: Start🚫 Logs to Stop Chewing
Identify habits or activities bogging down our dam and consider how to stop them.
Base column: Stop💦 Steady Currents to Continue
Highlight team practices that keep our river flowing smoothly and should be maintained.
Base column: ContinueAbout this template
Beaver Tail Bonanza uses playful metaphors to help teams identify new opportunities, remove blockers, and reinforce good habits—engineering tangible workflow improvements together.
When to use this template
Use this template when your team needs a lively structure to reassess habits, introduce new practices, and maintain momentum. It fits best at the end of a sprint, after major releases, or during workflow transitions.
How to facilitate
Welcome the team and introduce the beaver dam metaphor, explaining each column's meaning to set the tone.
Allow everyone 5–7 minutes of silent brainstorming to add ideas under all three columns: new branches, logs to stop, and steady currents.
Invite team members to review all posted cards, briefly clarifying any that may be unclear or need more context.
Facilitate a team discussion to group similar ideas, prioritize what to tackle, and dig into the underlying causes of both blockers and successes.
Collectively select a focused set of new actions or experiments from the 'new branches' column, and agree on which 'logs' to stop.
Confirm which current practices are essential to maintain, ensuring the team knows why they matter and how to keep them strong.
Wrap up by assigning specific owners to top action items and deciding how outcomes will be tracked until the next retro.
Pro Tips
Use the playful language as an icebreaker to encourage full participation, especially from quieter members.
Prompt the team for real examples or stories to make abstract ideas more concrete and relatable.
Watch for overloaded 'stop' or 'start' columns versus a light 'continue'—it can signal morale issues or change fatigue.
Try timeboxing discussions for each column to avoid getting sidetracked or too focused on one area.
FAQ
How do we handle vague or duplicate items?
Ask contributors to clarify their thoughts and combine similar items during group review to streamline discussion.
What if the same blocker appears every retro?
Address recurring obstacles in depth to uncover root causes and ensure action is assigned—persistent blockers often point to deeper issues.
How can we keep the session engaging for remote teams?
Leverage the beaver metaphor for icebreaker questions, encourage creative submissions, and rotate facilitators to keep things fresh.
At a glance
- Duration
40–55 min
- Team Size
4-10 people
- Columns
3 columns
- Base Format
Start, Stop, Continue
Tags
Ready to get started?
Use this template to run your next retrospective