The coach talks through 80 percent of a paratransit scheduling team's retrospective. What should the Scrum Master / Team Coach change?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
If the coach holds the microphone for 80 percent of a retro, it is a podcast, not a team inspection. Paratransit schedulers already know the missed trips; they need airtime and a little silence after a good question. Talk less, ask, then wait.
Full Explanation
Powerful questions only work if the coach also creates space for answers. When the coach talks through 80 percent of a paratransit scheduling team's retrospective, the Scrum Master / Team Coach should ask questions and leave silence so the team does most of the talking. Dominating airtime prevents the team from inspecting its own process and trains passivity around rider scheduling quality, on-time performance, and operational handoffs.
Keeping the lecture on Lean-Agile theory fails by concept: teaching-at instead of listening-with blocks inspect-and-adapt ownership. Canceling retrospectives and sending a written coach summary fails by concept by removing the team's forum for honest process inspection. Inviting the Release Train Engineer to take the remaining 20 percent fails by concept: substituting train messaging for team voice still leaves the coaching anti-pattern intact.
Exam caveat: SASM facilitation and coaching skills require the coach to talk less and question more in retrospectives; coach monologues are a common failure mode. Brief framing is fine—most of the talk time should still belong to the paratransit team discussing evidence and experiments.
Operational check: prepare a few open questions, speak less than a quarter of the time, use deliberate silence after each question, capture team-owned actions, resist filling every pause with theory, and confirm subsequent retrospectives show majority team airtime with measurable experiments on scheduling flow.