Taking Pride In Your Retrospectives
An opportunity to create a fun, educational & inclusive retrospective. 🏳️🌈
For some time I’d been looking for ways to create more interesting and engaging retrospectives that didn’t feel formulaic. Many retrospectives follow a similar pattern making them feel tired leading to a decrease in buy-in and participation.
Last week was Pride in London which felt as though it were an opportunity to create a retrospective that is not only inclusive & celebrates diversity, but educational too. Tying the theme of the retro to current events helped to keep the retro feeling fresh.
Here’s how the Pride retrospective was run within our team in order that you may take and run it with your own team (adapting as necessary). A complete slide deck is included at the end.
Opening — Guess the Flag
The opening for this retrospective is a little game called Guess the Flag — as well as being educational, it’s also fun and gets people talking so that by the time we arrive at the main event hopefully people will have warmed up and feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and feelings.
The way the game works is fairly straightforward — ask each member of the team to guess what they think each flag stands for. They will be awarded 1 point for each correct answer and the winner will be announced at the end. When I ran this retro there was a small reward for the person who scored the most points at the end of the retro.
If running this retro in person, answers can be written down or if running virtually then get each team member to send their answers to you via Slack or an alternative service.
I found that this opening game got the team into the spirit of pride, started people talking and was educational in the cases where they were unsure of the correct answer. After receiving a list of answers from each team member, the next slide in the retro deck (see the end of the article for the slide deck) goes through the answers. This is the first of two rounds of this game — the second round follows later.
Round 1 — Self-Expression
This brings us on to the first round of the retrospective titled Self-Expression. Each round in this retro has been given a name that relates to an important theme of pride — in this case, allowing individuals to express their authentic self.
In the self-expression round, the colours of the Pride Progress Flag have been listed out. The Pride Progress flag includes “black, brown, pink, pale blue and white stripes, to represent marginalised people of colour in the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the trans community, and those living with HIV/AIDS”. Team members will now be familiar with the Pride Progress flag (even if they weren’t previously) after having gone through the answers to the Guess the Flag round.
Ask each team member in turn the question which colour in the list they would be and why? I found the answers I received from posing this question were fun and sometimes unexpected. As a team leader, the answers have the potential to provide you with insight into how the team are feeling about the work that they are doing as well as how they are feeling more broadly. You won’t always receive answers which provide an insight into emotional state but the answer is at least likely to be fun.
Each person in the team gets the chance to speak and open up to the rest of the team without the possibility of interruption which is important especially in teams where there might be some team members who are naturally more subdued than others.
Round 2 - Pride
In this second round of the retro, ask each team member to name something they were proud of in the sprint.
I really enjoy this round because it generates a “good mood” feeling in the room and puts the emphasis on the progress that has been made. It’s important not only to focus on the things that could be improved in a sprint but to celebrates the successes.
The classic retro can too easily become a negative affair inciting criticism whereas a round like this promotes the positive, helping to ensure that not only do the team stop doing the things that didn’t work well but also that they keep doing the things that did work well.
Interlude — Meaning of the Stripes
This interlude is an educational segment explaining the meaning of the stripes in the classic rainbow pride flag as well as the more modern progress flag.
It highlights that frequently colours are associated feelings & emotions which serves nicely as a segue into the next, and main, round of the retrospective.
Meaning of the stripes isn’t a core round to the retro so if you are pressed for time it’s possible to drop this section and / or the guess the flag game.
More information on the meaning of the colours in the stripes can be found here:
- https://www.verywellmind.com/what-the-colors-of-the-new-pride-flag-mean-5189173
- https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-progress-pride-flag
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_flag_(LGBT)#Variations
Round 3 — Colour Psychology
This is the main round in the retrospective leading on from the interlude explaining the meaning of the colours used in the pride flags. Colours are frequently associated with emotions and therefore make a good vehicle for allowing team members to express themselves.
In this round, I have listed out the colours used in the progress flag as well as some of the emotions most commonly associated with each colour. Either on a physical whiteboard or a digital board, such as Miro, list out each of the colours above. Next, ask the members of the team to add post-it notes (either physical or digital) expressing thoughts, feelings or concerns relating to events which occurred in the sprint next to the relevant colour / emotion. When running this round of the retro — I set a 10 minute timer and and allowed the team to add notes until the timer elapsed.
At the end of the 10 minute period, go through each note and if people are willing to share ask what made them associate the note with a particular colour (this works best in teams with a high degree of trust and psychological safety). The emotion they chose that made them associate the note with a particular colour can be illuminating.
Interlude — Guess the Flag 2
Following the main round, we have one final round of guess the flag which increases the difficult a little in comparison to round 1. Again, ask each team member to send over their answers either on paper or via Slack (/ messaging service) and then in the subsequent slide go through the answers. Total up the scores each person received over the two rounds and declare a winner! 🎉
As well as being educational, it keeps the feeling of fun running through the retro and breaks up the core rounds of the retro which can feel more like work. It also helps distinguish this retro from others which often simply feel like variations on the same classic format.
Round 4 — Pride, Protest, March
The penultimate round is really just a variation of the classic start, stop, continue round which most will have experienced if they taken part in a retro before - but this time with a pride twist!
In this round pose the following questions to the team:
- What should we proud of? i.e. what positives should the team take away as things to keep doing in subsequent sprints. This is particularly important if the positive was something that was only introduced recently as it can often be the case that something is done well once and then forgotten about because of the fact that it went well.
- What should we protest? i.e. what did not work well and the team should endeavour to avoid repeating in future. Something may have been raised in the main colour psychology round that stands out as something the team need to stop doing or a situation that the team should endeavour to avoid.
- What should we be marching towards? i.e. what is the ideal end state of the team and what do the team need to start doing in order to get to that state. Are there things the team could start doing that might solve issues that were raised in the colour psychology round?
The aim here is to generate concrete actions that can be taken to improve the team’s effectiveness going into the next sprint and beyond. Having just discussed a number of thoughts, feelings & concerns in the main round there will be a number of things here that will be fresh in people’s minds. Ensure that for each action there is an owner who will be accountable for its completion.
Round 5 — Progress
The final round of the retro is the progress round. The name of the round is a reference to the progress flag but is also a nod to the key reason why you would run a retro in the first place i.e. making progress in the ways in which your team work together through iterative improvement.
It is key that the team feel as though progress is being made each time a retro is run. Otherwise, before long the team will become disenfranchised and come to view retrospectives as a waste of time. Therefore, as well as generating actions (as we did in the previous round), it is important to review the actions that were created as a result of the previous retrospective in order that the team can see the progress being made.
Wrapping Up
By now you should have discussed how the team felt about the previous sprint, reviewed the actions from the previous retro and generated some new actions to be reviewed next time. All that’s left to do is to crown the winner of the Guess the Flag quiz (and potentially award a prize). In case of our team, the quiz ranking determined the doughnut picking order!
Hopefully you’ll have had some fun and potentially learnt something new along the way! 🏳️🌈
Slides used for this retrospective can be found here.
Update: A newer set of slides updated for 2023 can be found here.
Note: In 2021 an updated version of the Pride Progress Flag was released to include the intersex flag. This adds a purple circle inside a yellow triangle to the chevron of the Pride Progress flag. Future iterations of this retro might be updated to use this iteration of the flag to increase inclusivity even further.
