In this talk we shared what we’ve learned about retrospectives that we’ve come to define as ‘High stakes’. Sometimes it’s because of the audience, sometimes the duration of the project and sometimes the nature of what happened. If retrospectives are intended to create meaningful change in our organisations - high stakes retrospectives are the ones in which the chance of achieving this change is lower than usual. This talk provides a structure that we’ve arrived at for approaching these kinds of session with the intention that should you be called to facilitate these spaces, you feel a little more confident and empowered to do so. We’re going to ask a lot of questions and they will surface different answers in different context; these are questions you should ask in preparation. We’ll also share some techniques that we found helpful to answer these questions.