Sailboat

Time

1 hour retro for a team of any size

Setup

Create a large drawing of a sailing boat. It should have a sail, an anchor, an island and some hidden rocks in the path of the boat.

These represent:

  • the team's goals (the island)
  • things holding the team back (anchor)
  • things that are helping the team reach their goal (the sail.. feel free to draw some wind as it adds to the metaphor)
  • risks to be wary of (the hidden rocks)

e.g.

Notes

Bring post-it notes and marker pens for each team member. Four colours of note would be ideal (red, green, yellow and blue).

You'll be setting the scene with this retro for the first time, so be prepared to answer questions.

The difference between a risk and a delay is that a delay has happened to the team, a risk is something they may be able to foresee, but hasn't happened so far.

Retro Format

1. Introduce your work of art to the team. Once they've finished laughing, explain the four sections of the diagram. (Separating by colour can help with the visualisation.)

2. Stick to this order:

    • GOAL
    • RISKS
    • WHAT'S HELPING
    • DELAY

3. Get the team to fill out stickies of the relevant colour and put then in roughly the right place on the picture.

4. Group similar notes and discuss each note (or groups of notes) as a team.

    • GOAL - Talk about the team goals and make sure the team discuss them until they agree.. or remove the note if they can't agree
    • RISKS - Talk about each Risk, and ask for suggestions on the impact of the Risk and how we can reduce or remove either the risk, or the impact it can have
    • WHAT'S HELPING - Often good things get skipped over. Make sure you give time to the things that are helping and ask if the team could do more of these or if there's something similar that could also help
    • DELAY - Similar to Risks, talk about the impact of delay and what can be done to reduce the impact of these items, or to stop these things from happening in the first place

5. To wind up the session:

    • Repeat back the remaining Team Goals;
    • Summarise what the team have decided to do about each area and get a solid action and owner from each of these actions.
    • If there are a lot of actions, get the team to vote on the top 3 or 4 actions that they will implement going forwards and make sure each action has an owner.