How often should a team run one?

Monthly for a standing team, and at the end of every event or project. More often than that and the same stickies come back; less often and small frustrations grow. A good rhythm is the last Friday of the month, before the changeover review.

What if the stop column fills with complaints about management?

Let it. Then ask which of them the team can change itself and which need to go up a level, and take the second group to the next tier meeting with the team leader's name on it.

How many actions should come out of it?

Two or three, each with an owner. A retrospective that produces ten actions produces none. Check them at the next retrospective before adding new ones, and keep the unvoted stickies on the board: they are the long tail for next time.

Start/stop/continue or lean coffee?

Start/stop/continue looks back at how the team works and produces actions. Lean coffee is a way of running any open meeting: topics, votes, timeboxes. A team might use lean coffee to discuss the actions its retrospective produced.

The team. The facilitator runs the session, the team leader owns bringing the actions back, and each action has its own owner.

Does it work with the manager present?

Better without, for the stop column. If the manager must be there, they add stickies last and speak last, and the facilitator reads the stickies without naming who wrote them.

Lean Studio board · Team & strategy

Start / Stop / Continue board

In one sentence

Start, stop, continue is a team retrospective format with three columns for what the team should start doing, stop doing and keep doing, voted down to two or three actions with owners.

Start, stop, continue is the simplest team retrospective: what should we start doing, what should we stop, and what is working that we should keep. Three columns, one sticky per thought, a vote, and two or three actions. It takes thirty minutes and works for a kaizen team, a shift or a project.

See it in action Start a 90-day pilot

When to use it

When to use the Start / Stop / Continue board

At the end of a kaizen event or a project, before the team disperses.
Monthly for a shift or a cell, to give the team a say in how it runs.
After a bad week, to turn frustration into a short list of changes.
When a new team leader wants to know what the team wants kept.
When two shifts on one line disagree about how the handover should work; run it with both shifts in the room.

What is on the board

1
Start
Things the team wants to begin doing.
2
Stop
Things that waste time or cause friction.
3
Continue
Things that work and should be protected.
4
Actions
The two or three the team votes for, with an owner.

Running it

How to run a Start / Stop / Continue session

1
The whole team, a facilitator who is not the team's manager if possible, 30 to 45 minutes, at the end of an event or once a month.
2
Five minutes of silent stickies into the three columns, one thought per sticky. Nobody speaks.
3
Read every sticky aloud, group duplicates, and ask for one example behind any that is vague.
4
Dot vote: everyone gets three dots, on any column. Count them and mark them on the stickies.
5
Take the top two or three into the actions strip with an owner and a date. Anything that needs a level up gets the team leader's name and goes to the next tier meeting.
6
Bring the board back next time and check the actions before adding new stickies. Start with what changed.
7
Write stickies about habits, not people: 'schedule changes by phone at 14:00', not a planner's name. The facilitator rewrites any sticky that names someone.
8
Good output: two or three actions the team chose, a continue column the leader has read, and a meeting that ended on time.

Worked example · sample data

Worked example

The sample retrospective came from a shift team. Start: a five-minute handover at the board, with four votes, and asking the setter before anyone changes the setup sheet. Stop: schedule changes by phone at 14:00, the most-voted sticky with five, and borrowing the torque gun from station 4. Continue: the Friday changeover review, and the wins on the huddle board, with three votes. Two actions came out. Schedule changes go on the board by 13:00, owned by J. Lind from planning, who had been invited to the session because the team knew where the stop vote would land. The handover at the board starts Monday, owned by the team leader. The torque gun sticky, with no votes, stayed on the board as a reminder that the second charger was still in progress on the kanban.

The board shown at the top of this page, read through. Invented data, not a customer.

Common mistakes

The manager facilitates their own team's retrospective. The stop column empties.
Ten actions. Two or three with owners, or none will happen.
Skipping the vote and taking the loudest sticky.
Not checking last time's actions before adding new ones.
Treating the continue column as filler. It tells a new leader what not to break.
Actions that never come back. If the team does not see last month's actions checked, it stops writing honest stickies.

How it works in Lean Studio

1
Start from the Start / Stop / Continue template: three columns and an actions strip.
2
Everyone adds stickies in silence for five minutes, then the team groups duplicates and each person marks their top three with a dot.
3
Move the most-voted stickies to the actions strip with an owner's name, and bring the board back at the next retrospective to check them.
4
Save the finished board to My templates so the next team starts from your version.

Lean Studio boards are drawn with stickies, text, shapes (rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, diamond), arrows and charts, and any board can carry the 15 data widgets, from a scorecard to a kanban. See all widgets and boards.

Also in LeanSuite

Where it goes next in LeanSuite

LeanSuite's Kaizen module runs improvement events and projects with owners, due dates and tracked savings.

An action that needs another department goes up as an escalated item on the tier board, and the reply comes back down to the team. Tiered Meetings
A start idea that is really an improvement suggestion goes into Idea Management, where a reviewer answers it and an approved idea can become a Kaizen project. Idea Management
A retrospective at the end of a Kaizen event sits with the event's project, whose follow-up actions have owners and due dates. Kaizen & Projects

See Kaizen & Projects

Open this board in LeanSuite

Start / Stop / Continue is one of the 30 ready-made boards in Lean Studio, LeanSuite's whiteboard. Try the interactive demo in your browser with sample data, or pilot LeanSuite on your own lines for 90 days, with the setup done by our team.

See it in action Start a 90-day pilot

What Lean Studio is

Related boards and templates

In the lean glossary

FAQ