Is this format too cute for serious work?

It looks cute and works seriously. Engineering teams that have just lived through an incident often find the fairy-tale frame easier to engage with than 'risk register' language, because it removes the implicit blame from naming fragility. Naming a House of Straw feels less like reporting failure than naming a 'critical risk'.

What's the difference between Straw and Sticks?

Straw would blow over the moment something hard happened. Sticks holds today, but you wouldn't trust it in a real test. The deployment process that nobody pushes on Friday is a Stick: it works because we're paying attention to it. The deployment process that breaks if the senior engineer is on holiday is Straw: one absence and it's down.

Can we run it for a normal sprint?

It tends to feel oversized. Three Little Pigs wants a longer horizon than a sprint. For a sprint, run Start, Stop, Continue or 4Ls. Save Three Little Pigs for the quarterly or for moments when the team needs to inspect durability specifically.

What if Bricks is empty?

Push for it. An empty Bricks column means the team is reading itself as having no foundation, which is almost never accurate. Ask 'what would still work if half the team called in sick tomorrow?' and wait. There's always at least one Brick, and naming it is useful for the team's confidence in itself.

How often should we run it?

Quarterly, or after a triggering event (incident, re-org, departure, growth spike). Running it every sprint dulls the format. The team starts producing Straw items for the sake of producing them, and the things that are actually fragile get diluted in the noise.

The toolkit · Three Little Pigs

Three Little Pigs retrospective

Houses of straw, sticks, and bricks. The retro format that asks what would survive if a wolf actually showed up.

30 prompts · 3 columns · free

🌾

House of Straw

What would blow over the moment things got hard?

10 prompts in this bucket

🪵

House of Sticks

What's standing up okay but you don't fully trust?

10 prompts in this bucket

🧱

House of Bricks

What would survive almost anything we threw at it?

10 prompts in this bucket

Try another framework

Frameworks that pair well with Three Little Pigs.

Sailboat

Wind, anchors, rocks, island. Visual metaphor that travels well.

Start, Stop, Continue

The classic. Three columns, fast to run, hard to argue with.

Rose, Bud, Thorn

What's blooming, what's growing, what's prickly. Garden metaphor, real insight.

Or see all 10 retro frameworks.

About the Three Little Pigs retrospective

The Three Little Pigs retrospective uses the fairy-tale frame to ask a question most retros avoid: what would happen if things got hard? Houses of straw are fragile. The system that's held together by one person knowing about it. The deployment process that works because nobody pushes on Friday afternoon. Houses of sticks are working today but shouldn't be relied on. Things that have grown past their original shape. Working agreements that everyone honours but nobody has written down. Houses of bricks are the foundation. The capabilities that would survive almost any pressure. The format is most valuable for quarterly retros, post-incident reviews, and any team that's about to absorb growth, turnover, or change. It surfaces fragility that other formats miss because other formats assume things are working when they're working today, without asking how they'd hold up tomorrow.

When Three Little Pigs is the right call

Quarterly retros. Pre-launch reviews. Post-incident debriefs where the formal post-mortem covered the incident but missed the broader fragility it exposed. Onboarding planning, when you need to know which parts of the team's setup would crack under a new joiner who doesn't know the implicit rules. Pre-departure planning, when a load-bearing teammate is leaving. Any moment where the relevant question is durability, not velocity.

Why the metaphor matters

The fairy tale is doing more work than you'd think. Straw, sticks, and bricks each call up a vivid mental image, which makes the categories sticky in a way abstract labels (fragile/medium/durable) wouldn't be. People remember a Three Little Pigs retro a quarter later because the metaphor encodes the categories. That memory is genuinely useful: the team carries the frame back into ordinary work, and people start naming things as 'a House of Straw' when they spot fragility in the wild.

Three Little Pigs versus Sailboat

Sailboat looks at momentum, drag, risk, and direction together. Three Little Pigs zooms in on resilience and skips the rest. Use Sailboat for a project mid-point. Use Three Little Pigs when the team is genuinely worried about durability or is about to absorb a shock (a re-org, a launch, a senior teammate leaving). Sailboat asks 'where are we going?'. Three Little Pigs asks 'what would survive if we got blown off course?'.

Common mistakes with Three Little Pigs

Treating it as a normal retro. The format doesn't work for a steady-state sprint, the team will produce shallow Straws and forced Sticks. Reserve it for moments that warrant durability questions. Second mistake: dropping the metaphor. The team that calls it 'identifying fragile, medium, and stable systems' loses 80% of what makes the format memorable. Third mistake: only listing technical fragility. Cultural and process fragility (single points of knowledge, tribal practices, undocumented agreements) are usually the more dangerous Houses of Straw.

Frequently asked

Is this format too cute for serious work?: It looks cute and works seriously. Engineering teams that have just lived through an incident often find the fairy-tale frame easier to engage with than 'risk register' language, because it removes the implicit blame from naming fragility. Naming a House of Straw feels less like reporting failure than naming a 'critical risk'.
What's the difference between Straw and Sticks?: Straw would blow over the moment something hard happened. Sticks holds today, but you wouldn't trust it in a real test. The deployment process that nobody pushes on Friday is a Stick: it works because we're paying attention to it. The deployment process that breaks if the senior engineer is on holiday is Straw: one absence and it's down.
Can we run it for a normal sprint?: It tends to feel oversized. Three Little Pigs wants a longer horizon than a sprint. For a sprint, run Start, Stop, Continue or 4Ls. Save Three Little Pigs for the quarterly or for moments when the team needs to inspect durability specifically.
What if Bricks is empty?: Push for it. An empty Bricks column means the team is reading itself as having no foundation, which is almost never accurate. Ask 'what would still work if half the team called in sick tomorrow?' and wait. There's always at least one Brick, and naming it is useful for the team's confidence in itself.
How often should we run it?: Quarterly, or after a triggering event (incident, re-org, departure, growth spike). Running it every sprint dulls the format. The team starts producing Straw items for the sake of producing them, and the things that are actually fragile get diluted in the noise.

When not to use it

Normal sprints with no special durability question on the table. Three Little Pigs is built for moments of inspection, not for the regular cadence. For sprints, run Start, Stop, Continue or 4Ls.

How to run a Three Little Pigs retro

1Block 60 minutes. The format wants depth and rewards taking the metaphor seriously.
2Open with the framing: 'If something hard happened next quarter, what would survive and what wouldn't?'. The fairy-tale framing is doing real work, lean in.
3Show all three prompts. Eight minutes of silent writing per category. The team needs more time than usual because the questions are unfamiliar.
4Discuss Straw first. The Straw column is where the team admits where it's most exposed. Loudest voices last.
5Move to Sticks. Sticks is the trickiest category because items there are working but shouldn't be relied on. Resist the urge to upgrade them in the meeting.
6Close with Bricks. The Bricks column is the team's foundation, and naming it is genuinely useful in a way other formats don't capture.
7Identify one Straw to fortify before the next quarter. One Stick to upgrade. Owners assigned. Send the recap in Slack with the metaphor preserved (it'll be remembered better that way).