This stage gives people time to “arrive” and get into the right mood. “Set the stage” part of retrospective is optional, because the team might be already prepared to discuss the results of last sprint.
Why it’s needed:
It gives everyone a chance to switch to context of the meeting.
By taking a few minutes to set the stage before getting into the heart of the retrospective, the team has the chance to switch from thinking about the last thing they were working on to thinking about the bigger picture.
It encourages participation.
Participants of the meeting are invited to talk to each other. Tune in to exchange information and opinions.
It grabs everyone’s attention
To start the meeting on a positive note, we can more productively move on to discussing more difficult work-related topics
- The main idea behind “draw your feelings” is to express a specific emotion, feeling or situation that you can’t normally express with words. Drawing it helps people later verbalize the reason behind it.
- It is really important to acknowledge how people feel, especially for a retrospective meeting. However, it is not easy for people to talk about emotions and it is even harder for them to connect emotions to the things that made them feel this way. The happiness radar provides a structure that helps with both.
- the main idea behind this activity is to ask people about something (usually the fact should be not directly related to work) and guess later, who answered in that way.
- the main idea is to guess a word, what is drawing another attendee of the meeting.
Guess who’s image it is. Everybody shares an image on a certain topic. Other attendees are guessing, who’s image it is. In a such way we can better know about each other hobby, interest etc.
One Word Check In. Ask all participants to answer a question using just a single word (feel free to change this to a single sentence, if you prefer). Example questions include:
In one word, how are you feeling right now?
If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
What was the last thing you ate?
If you could describe the previous iteration in a single word, what would it be?
