How PacMan can foster critical thinking in Retrospectives

This article speaks about how the team can benefit from templates that trigger critical thinking to develop constructive, actionable outcomes during Retrospectives.

Hereupon I bring a combination of PAC-MAN and What, So What, Now What template to support the teams in having constructive discussions and creating feasible, actionable improvements.

When designing a Retrospective my focus is always to bring in moving or powerful questions that can help the team to focus more on what can be done rather than ranting about the problem that is out of their reach.

Below is one such custom template I tried to experiment with by combining two activities PAC-MAN and What, So What, Now What that indeed complemented each other. The second activity tried to build up the conversation thread based on the topics discussed during the first activity. Throughout the Retrospective conversations many topics surface. It is a good practice to let the team vote on the most critical topic that they would like to resolve at hand. The other topics are important and some behavior or process changes do get conceived without explicit action items. I do not encourage teams to brainstorm and try to solve all the issues that get mentioned. Often taking too many decisions clouds the team's plan on what exactly needs to be done. In such a situation, everyone walks out with a separate…