As a scrum master, you have the responsibility to coach your team to improve the way they work together. This can be accomplished in many ways, but, in my opinion, this all comes down to how the retro is done.
To start with a good retro, transparency amongst the team members, the format of the retro and the guidance of the scrum master is essential.
In this article, I would like to share a retro format that I have conducted which was, to me and my team, a lot of fun. I would love to share more on the guidance and the transparency part, but I think that we can leave it for another day.
As a scrum master to-be, I am always trying to make the retro’s a bit more interactive and fun. But it all comes down to the following format. It usually starts with a check-in, after that an open sharing about the last sprint, an exercise to discover the good and challenging points, brainstorm on how we can prevent or improve these challenging points as a team and last but not least define action points.
However, I decided to turn the tables in the last retro. Let’s not make action points; let’s not share the good and challenging things, let us share amongst the team of what we think of each other.
I have prepared two exercises to let my team try to share their thoughts about each other.
The first exercise was the who is most likely to… exercise. I asked the team to think and vote secretly about who most likely is to … within our team, where … is the fun part. They voted in secret, and when everyone finished, they revealed at the same time who they have voted on. Here are some of the questions I asked:
- Who will most likely skip the daily stand up?
- Who will most likely delete a test case to make the CI/CD pipeline pass?
- Who will most likely to fail a math test?
- Who is most likely to flip the table during a tantrum?
The votes we got out per question were scattered amongst all the members, or everyone voted for one particular guy, including the guy itself. Crazy right? This is very interesting to everyone but also really fun since we could laugh about it, however, what happened after that was more important.
We brainstormed, and we tried to improve the situation for, for example, the first question, where everyone has voted for one guy. Our solution? We asked if he could initiate the standup!
The second exercise that we did was, again, an exercise to show how everyone was thinking about each other.
I asked the team to imagine that we are walking on the street, just from lunch, and then, suddenly, a triad gang jumps out of nowhere! They were in a group of 6 people, and we are in a group of 6. Then I asked the team to draw a formation of how we would stand in front of the triads to prepare the ‘fight’.
And guess what! Super creative ideas came out. Two members of the team were drawing the formation as if we were fighting the opposite gang. Another member imagined that the opposing gang was all of our stakeholders, INCLUDING the product owner. One even tried to draw the formation as if we were ready to surround them and to overtake them.
In the end, we made a formation together where we could all agree on that would work correctly for our team to conquer the triad gang. How fun is that?
Of course, this retro format is really for the teams who are working more closely together on professional, and maybe even personal levels. I would not recommend this to new teams or teams that are still working on their transparency and openness.
However, I would aim to go in this direction since we had a lot of fun and laughter together!
