The superhero the team needs

Monsters roam through your office building. Terrorists are hacking your infra systems, a big astreroid threatens to wipe out the entire city. A dictator tries to raid your city and steal your company secrets. Everyone panics, some people freeze and hide, others run through the building aimlessly, not knowing what to do. With some effort you call your team together and you do you: you organise a Retrospective. While the earth shartters beneath you and lava turns cars in the streets into smauldering piles the conclusion is swift: we need a superhero!

But which superhero do we need? Batman to take out the ciminals with his batmobile? Or Superman to stop the lava with his laser eyes? Or do you call the Hulk to catch the asteroid?

Of course, this is not a very realistic picture, but it is a fun retrospective which has a good result. In a creative way your team thinks about which skills your team lacks, and how you can fill those gaps.

Who is the superhero in your office?

Preparation

Collect picturs of all kinds of superheros you can think of. Take the word superhero in the broadest context possible, so Nobel prize winners, main characters in books, childhood heros, from fictional to real, everything goes. Also keep in mind to pick heroes popular in the past, fitting for older team mates.

If you’re having a physical retrospective, print them out on paper and put them on the wall. When you have a digital meeting, put all heroes together in an online collaboration tool (Mural or Miro or something like that). Net to that, make a template to answer the following questions:

• Which hero did you pick?
• Which properties does this person have? What makes him a superhero?
• Why do you think this hero is an addition for the team?
• What could we do to have some part of this superhero in the team?

Execution

• Introduce the theme to your team and explain they can pick a single superhero, and ask them to fill in the template based on their hero
• Give the team about five minutes to fill the template, obviously, you pick one for yourself as well!
• Discuss the superheroes and jot down any possible actions that come from this. You can do this all together, or you can use 1–2–4-All if the team is bigger.
• Show the team which actions you wrote down and ask if you’ve missed any.
• Let employees vote on which action they’d like to see implemented. You can use dot-voting for this if you’d like.
• Pick the 1 or 2 actions you will pick up together and put them on the sprint backlog.

This is a relatively simple retrospective with a low threshold of participation suitable for the entire team. It does give you a little insight in the personal preference of employees, without forcing it.

When I did this retrospective with my team, reactions were very positive and everyone picked a hero which fitted their personality, but also told something they’d like to see changed in the team. A refreshing different perspective than the old fashioned sailboat, race car or SWOT analysis.

Did you expect a blog in Dutch here? That could very well be — but in order to reach a wider audience I decided to translate this blog to English!