Using the Socratic Method to Drive Better Sprint Outcomes

Sprint Retrospectives are vital for continuous improvement, but sometimes the conclusions drawn can feel abstract or lack a solid foundation. By integrating the formal steps of the Socratic Method (Elenchus) into your retrospectives, you can drive a deeper understanding of your team’s experiences and produce more grounded, effective concluding actions.

The goal is twofold: a better understanding of the team’s experience and the generation of concrete, reality-based improvement actions.Gathering Experiences: The Formalized Socratic Method

The Elenchus method, or the Socratic Method of questioning and refutation, provides a formalized five-step process for dissecting an experience until its root definition is clear:

1. Receive: Ask the team members to share their experience from the previous Sprint. The key here is to listen without judgment and capture what happened in the team’s own words.
2. Reflect: Paraphrase the experience back to the team. This step is crucial for mutual understanding. By echoing back the main ideas, you ensure that you, as the facilitator, have accurately grasped the core issue and that the team agrees on the narrative.
3. Refine: Once the core experience is established, ask for underlying assumptions and supporting evidence. This is where you move beyond surface-level observations to examine the foundational beliefs and data points surrounding the experience.
4. Restate: Paraphrase the experience again, but now incorporate the newly added details about the assumptions and evidence. This iteration adds depth and precision to the definition of the issue.
5. Repeat: Continue this cycle of receiving, reflecting, refining, and restating until the experience is clearly defined, understood by all, and no further assumptions or evidence can be uncovered.

Reality Check: Ensuring Empirical Results

While powerful, the Socratic Method has been criticized for potentially producing false conclusions¹ if the underlying premises are flawed or not verified. In a retrospective, we cannot afford to base our future actions on abstract or unverified “truths.”

To address this, an essential step must be added to anchor the process in reality: Check the experience definition against empirical evidence.

Before moving to concluding actions, take the time to verify the clearly defined experience against your Sprint data-metrics, logs, burndown charts, or any other hard evidence. This ensures that the understanding you’ve developed is not only clear but also based in the reality of your team’s performance.

Concluding Actions: The Outcome

The entire exercise is focused on developing one of two, or both, critical outcomes for your next Sprint:

1. An Actionable improvement plan for the next Sprint.
2. An improvement of the Definition of Done (DoD).

By clearly defining the root cause of an experience and validating it against empirical evidence, your concluding action will be well-defined, measurable, and firmly based in reality. This significantly increases the likelihood that your next Sprint will incorporate a meaningful and effective change.

Caveat 

It is critical that the facilitator ensures a high degree of psychological safety when employing the Elenchus method. The nature of sustained questioning and refutation must be carefully managed to prevent the process from feeling like a personal confrontation, keeping the focus strictly on the team’s shared experience and underlying assumptions.²

¹ Winter, Theo. “Smarter Thinking: The Socratic Method.” Human Performance Technology By DTS, 26 June 2017, blog.hptbydts.com/smarter-thinking-the-socratic-method. Accessed 17 Jan. 2026.

²Ash, Simon. “The Socratic Method in Coaching: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Leadership.” The Right Questions, therightquestions.co/the-socratic-method-in-coaching-ancient-wisdom-for-modern-leadership/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2026.