LEGO ® Serious Play ® for retrospectives – second try –

Hello to everyone, today, another excited retrospective with one of the team I am working on. During the spring happened few events and all had a “happy” end for the full team and stakeholders. We decided to run one retrospective with LEGO ® to build the positive feeling of each team member.

First, I would like to take few lines to explain why I started to use LEGO ® games more often. I am always surprised for the big attraction I have to those small bricks, but I always think that I am adult acting as kid when I see LEGO ® sets. I have one son of 11 years old and in the last 5 or 6 years I really enjoyed to buy all kind of LEGO ® sets I could. Of course, some times my little boy was asking for the big box, I knew that he will be not able to do it alone, but I internally was convinced that he will ask for help and I will be always ready to help to put all bricks together. I was right, at the end, he asked me for help and I was doing the big “job” 🙂

About 2 or 3 year ago, I started to read about games at companies and someday in 2011 I dropped in one page talking about LEGO ® Serious play ®. At the time, I started to read and try to don’t talk a lot about it, I was feeling like playing with LEGO ® in one company could not be the best of the ideas. However, I was convinced very fast that it could work. I tried to run my first game and the client rejected, the excuse was: “we are working here, we play at home with our kids”. I was a little upset with myself, I was 100% sure that I failed showing the advantage of doing it. In any case, I didn’t desist about this and after eliminate few fears about how to run the first time one retro with LEGO ®, I started to try it and you are able to see the result in my blog. In resume, please try it and evaluate the results. You will be surprised about the amazing results.

That was my history with LEGO ®, now here is the result of this retrospective with LEGO ® Serious play ®. The idea of this retro, as I said in the first lines, was “Positive Thinking”.

The rules, very simple ones:

• Time box of 20 min to build
• Build more of one structure representing something from the sprint
• The challenger: you have to convert something negative in the sprint in something positive
• Few minutes at the end to present the history
• Game debrief and discussion about the game and the sprint
• Action Items or new ideas to deploy in next sprint

The result, full team engaged, included the PO.

Team working hard…:

After 20 min of hard work, concentration and good music to relax us…:

Few LEGO ® structures, creative things, and interesting “positive” thinking from the team.

Special mention to our PO, he was on fire that day, check this:

He was almost without space to represent about 4 different items/events of this sprint. BRAVO!!!

That is all for now, I hope you enjoy it and please share your comments, feedback and experiences. I will very happy to listen your different experience in this case with LEGO ®.

If you liked this, please subscribe you to my blog updates and get updates by email (I write between 2 and 5 articles per month). You will find the form here on the right side of the page.

Thank you,

Omar