In a guest session at one of our Open Fridays Cynthia Hohlstein and Kevin Plechinger hosted an inspiring session on and with Story Cubes. Because neither of them blogs, I get to share their idea with you: Story Cubes are sets of 9 dice with images on them. The images cover a wide range of motives, such as speech bubble, sheep, star, hand, walking stick figure, … The idea is that you roll 3 dice and then tell a story that contains the 3 motives you rolled.
This can easily be turned into a fun activity for agile retrospectives: players answer a question instead of just telling a story. Cynthia and Kevin already had a couple of ideas:
- What was last sprint like?
- How do customers view our product?
- What’s the state of agility here in our company?
- What was your carreer path? How did you get here?
- …
We spend the hour-long session answering questions in groups of three. It was very interesting because the cubes prompt you to talk about aspects you wouldn’t normally have touched on – you tell the truth and still have to incorporate the 3 images. Among others, we used the “Customer View” question and it was quite revealing. Story Cubes help with changing perspective and add a fun element.
Thank you Cynthia and Kevin for introducing us to story cubes!