Guessing what team members think today…

Hello everyone,

Today I want to present something different I tried in our retro.  We really like it, so I want to share it with you. I realized that pictures have a big impact in our life. We also know that one picture could represent 1000 words, and also it could help to express the people in a easy way. Due to that, I decided to run one retrospective with pictures. It took  some times to take a good set of picture, but with some effort, you could get it.

Here, you could see few picture the team took to start to talk:

Here is the description of the exercise we did:

Theme:  “Team members in two different directions without communication” – you must adapt it to your team situation. –
Game:

• Purpose:
  • Get the full team talking about team “theme”
  • Get ideas to try in the future
  • Try to force a little bit to team member to guess what others think and understand their team mates
  • Help to prepare the field for a mature discussion about sprint issues

• Process:
  1. State the Prompt: “Select an image related to what do you think/feel about our problem/discussion about the “theme” “
  2. 30sec for each person to select an image in response to the prompt (nobody must see the card of the other ones)
  3. 1min/2min to write down about the image, why did you take that image? (Minimum 5 ideas/feelings/comments/concepts)
  4. Exchange papers with your left partner,
  5. Team pictures from step 2 need to be in the table at this moment. Try to add some extras ones to get more fun.
  6. One team member will read what other team member write down and try to guess the right photo associated to the paper he just read. He has to explain why he thinks the photo and the text match.
  7. The writer then identifies which photo they chose and why

• Debrief
  • What did you noticed?
  • Does this remind us about the situation we leave last week?
  • What did you learn?
  • Why we arrive to that situation?
  • What we should do to avoid it in the future?
  • Do you have any new idea/AI/something to try in the next sprint?

This game took about 20 min and the team generated around 60/75 min of very good discussion.  I am not able to said that “the game” generated the big discussion; however, it helps a lot to force the team member to know what the others think and prepare the field to “the discussion”.

My recommendation is try it when the team is not able to talk about the issue or when the team is able to talk of the issue but the subject could be a “hot” issues as it was my case.  I really like it and the team got some fun at the moment each one took one picture.  As I said, pictures have a big power.

I have in mind more exercises with pictures. I will share them with you as soon as I try them. I really like to give you good tips to run them, so I need to run them first few times 🙂

What do you think? did you try pictures in your retros? Feel free to share your comments/feedback.

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Thank you,

Omar