This exercise was co-created as part of a collaboration day between myself and Paul Goddard although we have a sense that something like this has been done before we couldn’t recall who or where…

Timing:

30 minutes

Materials:

Large whiteboard or roll of white paper

Appropriate drawing, colouring or painting materials

Instructions:

  • Ask the team to draw/paint their interpretation of the Sprint. This is usually done on a large whiteboard/sheet of paper.
  • It is also usually done in silence and all at the same time (although see variations below)
  • This can then lead into the other stages to explore what the images are (gather data), what they mean (gather insights) and so on.

Learning Points: 

  • Exploring the more visual side of the brain to look back at the Sprint in a more abstract way
  • By doing this in silence we shouldn’t be overly influencing one another
  • By all contributing we will be inviting questions and explanations of the interpretations
  • A great visual capture of the team’s experiences which could, over time, be collated into a storybook of the project

Variations:

  1. You may close the retrospective by asking the team to repeat the exercise and see what the picture looks like then.
  2. Ask each team member to draw their picture of the Sprint in isolation and then present them back to the team/create a gallery

One thought on “The Sprint Mural

  1. Hi Geoff, you are quite right in something has been done similarly.

    I learned from Esther Derby and Jerry Weinberg what is called an Art Gallery retro, I’ll write that up as it is a super useful variant of what you have here. It works well for large groups (multiple teams) as well as for teams. It has a constellation exercise before the creation of the drawing to have people that have been working closely together co-create the diagrams or drawings.

    Cheers,
    Paul

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