The point of this retro is to create some empathy within the team whilst generating ideas for improvement. We will do this by having some fun, guessing who wrote which items in gameshow style and then talking through some of those ideas and taking actions.
Tools
Use something like Funretro.io
Prep
Pick your retro format. Most of the simpler techniques will work for example Stop/Start/Continue, Keep/Add/Less/More or Change/Retain for example. Their are many, many more.
Set up the board in fun retro, its probably best to hide other tickets. Don’t tick “Show cards Author”!
Ask the team to enter a ticket for each of the categories before the retro and to not tell anybody. Raising only one point per category is best. So for example one for Change and one for retain.
Optional: Create a deck of cards for each person in the team. This deck should contain a card with the name of each participant. We will use these to vote during
the retro.
Create a table on either a whiteboard or in excel to keep track of the score as per
The Retro
- Introduce the retro, thank everyone for keeping their tickets quiet
- Introduce the rules as seen in pic —->
- Optional: Give everybody their pack of name cards
- Reveal the board
- Read out the first ticket and ask the team to vote on who they think wrote that ticket. Doing 3,2,1 reveal is good so people don’t copy each others answers.
- Assign points to the people who got it right
- Continue through the rest of the tickets assigning points for the successful team members
- Announce your winner and optionally talk about why empathy is important in a team
- Talk through the tickets as you would in a normal retrospective and take actions.
Note: If you don’t want to or can’t do this online you can do this by asking your team to send you their tickets and then you writing them on post its. Obviously encouraging the team to keep them secret until the retro.
If you like the sound of this retro have a read of the empathy survey too
Sketch and Scrum 