01 · The problem
The retro isn't the problem.
The meeting goes fine — people are honest, the board fills, three actions get owners in the room. Then the output goes where it always goes: a doc, a Confluence page, the bottom of an epic. A doc can't follow up, and chasing a peer on their retro commitment costs social capital most people won't spend.
02 · What you need
An owned loop, not a bullet point.
Each action leaves the retro with the two fields it actually needs — an owner and a due date — and the friction it came from travels with it, so next month starts from context. Nothing lands in your tracker without your sign-off: she drafts the item, you approve, edit or refuse.
03 · How it runs
Chased mid-sprint, when it can still change the sprint.
Set where the checking-in happens and what a "done" gets checked against. Every step rewrites itself to match — and the nudge reads as team routine rather than you personally chasing a colleague, which is the whole reason it actually happens.
04 · What it's worth
The retro format is the cheap part.
You can run a good retro with a whiteboard and three columns — the format was never what failed. What failed was the fortnight afterwards, and no template fixes that.