Introspection - Team work

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Adapted from:

40 ideas to spice up your retrospectiveAgile Strides

In the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby, the authors explain a retrospective as having the following steps:

• Set the Stage: make sure everyone feels safe and is involved in the retro

• Gather The Data: what happened, make sure everyone has the same picture

• Generate Insights: analyze the data to find root causes

• Decide What To Do: what are experiments that could help us to improve 1% a day

• Closing: close the retro with an activity

Remember that your retro is covering the past 4 weeks and should keep the focus on their soft skill development including teamwork, time management and communication

Step 1 - Set the Stage

(Use online whiteboard like Miro, or Google Jamboard to post answers)

Your Superpower

Using Superheroes as a theme for your retro, ask the question: What is your superpower? What skill or competence do you bring with you to the group? Write your superpower on a sticky note or text box and explain why youchose that particular trait or skill.

Step 2 - Gather the Data

(You can use an online retro board for this like Metro Retro or Easyretro)

Superhero (This is basically the same activity as for example Liked, Learned, Longed For, but by using different terms and images to challenge participants and keep it fun.) Also you can use different Superhero names which are not cis white men!

Write your answers to the following questions on a sticky note or text box. What do you think was super ? What do you think was strange? What do you think was bad? What didn’t you dare to do? What was scary?

Talk about the Super and Strange things you wrote down. Leave the Bad and Scary things to discuss in the next step.

Step 3 - Generate Insights:

(Use the same Metro Retro or Easyretro board)

Using the data gathered in Step 2, discuss what were the causes for why things were bad and why things were scary. Why did they go wrong? Why were you afraid to try something? Write your answers on the retro board.

Step 4 - Decide what to do:

SMART Actions (Use whiteboard Miro or Jamboard)

Template: In order to <reach our goal> we will <do an action> before <a point in time>. We will know we are successful when <measure of the result happens>.

Step 5 - Closing:

Team Super Powers

As a positive closing of the retrospective, write down what you think is the superpower of the team.