A branch retrospective on the beach

The story of how we designed our retrospective exercise on the beach

This week was our first annual EOY event in the Australian branch. We decided it was a good time to do a retrospective for the subsidiary to talk about company processes and ways of working. We thought it would be nice to do it somewhere a bit different from our usual office environment…so for this specific event, we choose to do it on the beach.

Doing a retrospective on the beach introduces some constraints. Things you take for granted in a traditional retro (a wall or board to engage and collaborate around, post-its, etc) aren’t readily available so it forces us to get creative. On the plus side it also provides an informal atmosphere to facilitate interesting discussions and of course some time for refreshing dips. The purpose of this post is to share the format we used that day and open the discussion for more ideas, please share your experiences too!

A bit of context before starting

We wanted the format to be different because a subsidiary retrospective may be very different from a team retrospective. For our subsidiary retrospective we had a larger group, more time but also a different content to cover compared to the typical team retrospectives. Our goal was to find insights on a more global scale, and not necessarily actionable items to implement in the next sprint.

We chose to do 2 activities:

• The first part, to get the mood of the team on various subjects.
• The second, more classical, was inspired by the following: http://www.funretrospectives.com/kalm-keep-add-more-less/ where the goal was to gather some insights that are a bit more actionable at a company level.

Part 1: The mood meter

We started the retrospective with a “multi-axis mood meter”. We thought it could act as a short ice breaker to generate ideas and insights for the second activity.

The different axes we chose for this session were:

• Trust, to gauge the trust within the teams and between teams/subsidiaries
• Fun, to gauge the level of enjoyment in work because we think it is an important driver for productivity and motivation
• Integration with OnlinePajak, (i.e. the other subsidiaries) since we are a new subsidiary
• Learning, context, tool, technologies…
• Pace, pace of the work, too fast or too slow can foster tension amongst the teams
• Availability of others, a way to measure the collaboration and the effect of potential blockers

We decided to use balls as our data points and draw the different axes in the sand. Each axis represented a metric from the list above. Each member was asked to place his/her ball according to their feelings: the center of the spokes being 0 (couldn’t be worse), and the furthest being 5 (couldn’t be better)

The idea was to use balls to visualise the individual and group consensus as the basis for discussions.

The learnings from this workshop:

• It worked better than expected, a lot came out.
• While areas of strong opposition or consensus can be easily identified, the task made it difficult to facilitate generating conclusions.

Pro:

• Visual and fun
• Collaborative
• Semi-anonymous, everybody “vote” at the same time

Cons:

• Not always easy to express your point of view in front of everybody. Requires/assumes some level of trust and openness amongst the group.

Duration: 30 minutes + 10 min preparation

Part 2: KALM, Keep Add Less More

The second workshop was a bit more solution-oriented, but we decided to keep the balls as part of the fun. Just add a few stickers so that people can write on the balls and you have your new Post-Its! (Just don’t do what Tristan did and buy labels instead of painstakingly taping paper to each of the balls!)

The idea is for everybody to write on the balls and throw them into one of the specific sand holes.

We dug 1 hole for each category: Keep, Add, Less, More.

Then played the game the same way you would have done in a standard wall/board retrospective.

The content of the tickets in one category could look like this (Keep). Sand holes are just here to group balls by category.

The learnings :

• This format is similar to a Keep/Drop/Start so people were more familiar with it.
• The “game” side of using balls on which you write on it was still nice and kept people going

Overall, everyone seemed to enjoy participating in the event. If we had a bit more time (it took 1h30 with 14 participants), we probably would have played a third exercise, more oriented on actions and next steps, but this will be for next time…any excuse to go back to Manly.

If you would like to know more about Rituals and facilitating Workshops, please get in touch.

Encouraged to try a beach retro with your team, let us know and share your experience!