How a Drawing Of a Rhino Can Help Your Team Take An Outside Perspective
A retrospective format to playfully challenge your team to be open-minded
Whether your Scrum team is completely new to the game or a seasoned group of professionals, we all deal with challenges other teams have faced before us. Be it a complex refactor issue that needs to be untangled, a challenge to layout the deliverables for an upcoming feature, or a difficult situation in team dynamics your team is dealing with.
Many teams want to resolve these challenges on their own. Perhaps because experimenting is part of the Agile mindset. And while it is great to learn from experimenting and observations, this empirical approach does not mean you shouldn’t sometimes find the help of outside perspectives to get a better angle on the real issue.
I created a retrospective format for teams who face a challenge and could benefit from a more open-minded approach. It is based on a creativity prompt called ‘Never seen, never will’ I heard about in John Green’s podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed.
The retrospective format starts with an introductory story about a drawing of a rhinoceros made in 1515 by the German artist Albrecht Dürer. This story illustrates what may happen when we draw an image with limited information.
Dürer’s Rhinoceros
The first rhinoceros in Europe was brought from India to Portugal as a gift to the Portuguese king. Its appearance has quite an impact and word quickly spreads through Europe by letters and rough sketches like the ones that reach Dürer in Germany.
He has never seen a real rhinoceros, but based on the descriptions in two letters and a rough sketch that is included, he makes up a drawing which in his mind is a realistic image of a rhinoceros.
From the limited descriptions given to him and having never seen the animal, Dürer understands a rhino has armor around him. He translates this into his drawing as plated armor, including rivets, we now know it does not have.
“The human imagination tends to fill in blank spaces, or unknows, with guesses that are deeply shaped by our humanness. When Dürer read that the rhino had skin-like armor, he imagined 16th-century European human armor. Because, what else could he imagine.” — John Green
Additional perspectives complete the picture
Albrecht Dürer made an honest mistake, based on an assumption that in today’s day and age wouldn’t be necessary. He filled in what he didn’t know with information of what he did know.
Just like Dürer we make assumptions all day, we fill in the blanks with these unknowns. But unlike Dürer, who used all the sources available to him, we have more opportunities to find different perspectives. Perspectives that could help us form a more complete image and a better outcome to our challenges.
Sometimes your team can benefit from an outside perspective. Someone who dealt with this issue before to nudge your team in the right direction. It is this realization that this retrospective format is trying to uncover.
Never seen, never will — a retrospective format
- Introduce your team to the story of Albrecht Durer and the drawing of his rhinoceros.
- Have them think of something that exists, but that they’ve never seen and most likely never will. (Each team member can think of something different; examples could be; what does the end of the universe or a storm on Jupiter look like? What does the earth’s core or the bottom of the deepest ocean look like? And closer to home perhaps, what does each team member’s living room look like? Everything is possible).
- Let them articulate this in any form or platform they want.
- Let them talk about how this representation might differ from the real thing. And what holes they filled with their context (like the rivets on the rhino’s armor).
- After doing this, ask the team to think about the challenge their team is facing. And perhaps challenge them to think which outside perspective would give them a better viewpoint on their challenge.
I hope (and think) this makes for a fun and inspiring session. Good luck!
Sources:
Podcast: Anthropocene Reviewed / Episode: Orbital Sunrise
Creativity prompt — never seen, never will by David Brooks
