Entertaining retrospectives with an encore of added data

Entertaining retrospectives with an encore of added data

We recently tried a new retrospective format (recommended by @KatCrichton), which I thought worth reviewing publicly. It’s essentially the same as a basic retro, listing things which went well and things that didn’t on post it notes. The difference with this format is that they are then placed on a matrix with a scale of people/technology intersecting confident/apprehensive (as pictured below)

An interesting observation was that most of the things we are currently confident about relate to people, while largely our improvement areas related technology. What is interesting is that this is something that recently was likely to have been the complete opposite, with larger concerns relating to recruitment etc. Either way, it provides some additional information that just using ‘what went well’ and ‘what went badly’ wouldn’t have provided us.

We also use an alternative format called ‘art attack’. This entails drawing a representation of things which are either positive or causing us pain. We can then discuss them in turn to try and resolve them.

In this format we don’t get the additional data benefit mentioned above, but it is very enjoyable and also tends to ensure that we are concentrating our time discussing the most important subjects in the eyes of the participants. This is due to participants needing to take longer to add items they want to discuss, therefore leading to them only focusing on the most prominent issues. Splitting the team into smaller groups to do this on flip charts also leads to smaller discussion quickly filtering or prioritising some of the problems

Obviously using voting and other mechanisms we can achieve the same goal, but then we wouldn’t get treated to the creativity of Fran Mendoza’s design (which was redrawn as an example in the title photo). You can have a round of applause if you can guess it’s meaning

This is only a small insight into a process here, but if it helps one person think about their retro formats (or reminds us to) then it’s been of benefit

I hope this helps. Feel free to comment, share and discuss

Chris Watkins