July’s topic was posted by a community member on our meetup site, and after receiving a number of votes, we decided to make it the focus of a Wisdom of the Crowd night. What’s a Wisdom of the Crowd night? It’s one with no formal speaker or presentation—we enable our community to share their experiences and questions to generate new ideas and learning for all of us! We use an open space format to allow for deeper discussions of subtopics in smaller groups; if a member is interested in more than one subtopic or isn’t engaged in the group he’s in, he can move to another group without questions or judgment. Best of all, each group shares its findings at the end of the night with everyone, so we can all benefit from their learnings.
The meeting topic was Overcoming the fear of Sprint Retrospectives:
The sprint retrospective is by far the most underutilized and under appreciated meeting. Team members dread to go these meetings. Every Scrum Master has his own technique on how he overcame this and there is always room to grow.
We kicked off with some of the questions on our minds and split into multiple groups based on which question we wanted to explore further. The groups had rich discussions and came up with so many ideas that they used the whiteboards to capture them:
DFW Scrum User Group 
What would you do if you want actions to overcome the fear of retrospectives? You do a starfish retrospective!
I recognize and support the actions. To make retrospectives valuable you need actions with impact and lasting change. Making actions concrete, visible helps. As does following up on actions.
Thanks for sharing this Allison!