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:
- You may close the retrospective by asking the team to repeat the exercise and see what the picture looks like then.
- Ask each team member to draw their picture of the Sprint in isolation and then present them back to the team/create a gallery
Certified Scrum Coach and CST in the UK and really interested in learning through play
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