I've just been reading an interesting post on Better Retrospectives over on the Agile & Business blog. Retrospectives are one of those Agile techniques for continual process improvement that can become formulaic very rapidly, which in turn reduces the quality of the output from those meetings.
The advice in Agile & Business is sound, in that you need to find the biggest impediment, brainstorm a set of actions to remove that impediment ensure that the actions are owned and then report back on the results of those actions. I'd also add that you need to have fun doing it so you (a) don't get so hung up on what's wrong with the way you're working and (b) so that your ideas remain fresh and creative. There's an excellent book called Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby, Ken Schwaber and Diana Larsen that I'd wholeheartedly recommend. It's full of exercises to help you improve your retrospective meetings and is aimed at both Scrum Masters and individual team members.
