Getting creative with your Sprint Retrospectives

A great Sprint Retrospective, a creative ice breaker that gets everyone involved whilst using Liberating Structures and coaching to generate great insights.

This article is part of a series of Sprint Retrospective stories. Each story will walk you through the steps, my audience for the original posts were the organisation I was working with at the time. Keeping it straightforward with no fluffy edges. Each story is the write up of a real Sprint Retrospective that I’ve ran with one of my teams. I’ve removed reference to names and blurred faces where needed.

The team had just finished a fantastic Sprint Review, where we had some great conversations and feedback about the work we had done and the work we have coming up. To switch the team out of future thinking and back into divergent thinking mode they were each given a sheet of A4 paper.

The paper had fifteen pre-drawn curved lines, each of these lines are the start of a different drawing. The team were given 2.5 minutes to ‘finish’ the drawings. Do as many as they can, not to worry about completing them, but finish off as many of the drawings as possible.

This is a fantastic technique, no further instructions are given, the analytical people generally start asking more questions, but ultimately they get given the same information they had at the start.

As you can see, each person has their own interpretation of what those pictures should be, the team took it in turns to go through what they had drawn and their thinking behind them. This generally switches the brain into more of divergent thinking mode which is perfect for generating insights within the Sprint Retrospective. It also lightens the mood and allows people to become more relaxed ready for what’s to come.

As a quick alternative to ‘Complete the drawing…’ exercise above, we asked the team to think of as many uses for a paperclip as they possibly can, they had one minute to write as many down as possible. Some people find this easier and some people find this harder to do. But generally you get the same outcome in terms of setting people up for…

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