How to use the Emotional Culture Deck in your next retrospective?

Through my various experiences with the Emotional Culture Deck, I’ve started discovering new ways how you can use the Deck. One of the ways was for using it as the check-in exercise for a team/sprint retrospective.

As you probably know, it is a good practice to start a team retrospective with a short activity to allow everyone to speak, to assess the energy levels, to help everyone get focused. And Emotional Culture Deck can help with all of this and even more. What I found out was that the Deck nicely sets the stage for the next parts of the retro.

So how does it work? I give everyone a set of black and white cards from the Deck. And I ask everyone to spend a couple of minutes and choose one black card (positive emotion) and one white card (negative emotion) — emotions they felt most often or emotions they felt the strongest or maybe emotions which were the most surprising (you can change the questions every time you use the Deck for the check-in activity). When everyone has two cards ready, I ask everyone to share the emotions they chose, with a quick comment. It is amazing to see how this part allows people to share their reflections and build empathy for others. It is important to add that I also share my 2 emotions, this helps me share my inner world with everyone, create deeper relationships and role model sharing and genuine care.

After this exercise, the retro can follow any structure you wish. Don’t be surprised though if you start seeing new discoveries shared thanks to the check-in exercise. The Deck has the power of allowing people to go a bit deeper in their reflections and it can change the dynamics and create unusual openness in people.

This experience pushed me to try use the Deck in my 1:1 coaching conversations. From time to time I bring the Deck with me and start the conversation is a similar manner — I ask the person I coach to choose 2 emotions and we start talking about the positive and negative emotions. And we try to unpack what is behind them and what challenges we should try to tackle next.

Give it a try yourself and see how many powerful conversations the Deck can trigger.

P.S. You can buy the Emotional Culture Deck HERE, and use the code JAKUBJURKIEWICZ for 10% discount 🚀