Retromat: A3 Structure: 22-127-145-63-144

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Temperature Reading (#22)

Participants mark their 'temperature' (mood) on a flipchart
Source: Unknown

Prepare a flipchart with a drawing of a thermometer from freezing to body temperature to hot. Each participant marks their mood on the sheet.

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Gather data

Delay Display (#127)

What's the current delay? And where are we going again?
Source: Christian Schafmeister

Draw a table with 3 columns. Head the first one 'Destination', the second one 'Delay' and the last one 'Announcement'.

Introduce the scenario: 'You are at a train station. Where is your train going? (It can be anything, a fictional or a real place.) How much of a delay does the train currently have? And what is the announcement? Why is there a delay? (This can be a real reason or modeled after the typical announcements.)'

Each team member fills out 3 sticky notes, 1 for each column. Going around the circle, each team member posts their notes and explains briefly, why they're going to destination X and why there's a delay (or not).

Trains and train delays are very familiar in Germany. Depending on your country and culture you might want to pick a different mode of transportation.

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Generate insights

Braver (#145)

What does courage look like? What would the team do if they were bolder?
Source: Johanna Amlacher

Put up four posters with the following questions:

Which person in the team do you find courageous and how does courage show itself?
When have you felt insecure and wished you were braver?
What helps you to be brave?
What bold idea would you try as a team if you were 10 times bolder?

For each question do a round of:

4 minutes of quiet time to answer the question on sticky notes
Ask people to read out and post their answers. (In a large group you can use 1-2-4-All to discuss answers in smaller groups first.)
Cluster similar answers

(We do it in several rounds to slowly warm up the participants to tackle the last question.)

After the last round, look at all the answers and facilitate a discussion. Ask participants what is standing out for them? What's unexpected? What patterns do they see? What do these patterns mean for them as a team?

Then ask the team to rate themselves on a scale of 1-10: How brave do they think they are? Followed by: What would be possible if they were one step higher on the scale?

Based on everything they’ve talked about, what would they like to try that’s somewhat bold yet safe enough?

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Decide what to do

Low Hanging Fruit (#63)

Visualize promise and ease of possible courses of actions to help pick
Source: Tobias Baldauf

Reveal a previously drawn tree. Hand out round index cards and instruct participants to write down the actions they would like to take - one per card. When everyone's finished, collect the cards, shuffle and read them out one by one. Place each 'fruit' according to the participants' assessment:

Is it easy to do? Place it lower. Hard? More to the top.
Does it seem very beneficial? Place it more to the left. Value is dubious at best? To the right.

The straightforward choice is to pick the bottom left fruit as action items. If this is not consensus, you can either have a short discussion to agree on some actions or dot vote.

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Close the retrospective

Elevenie (#144)

Write a short poem
Source: Stefanie Dinh

An Elevenie (German 'Elfchen') is a poem with 11 words on five lines – 1, 2, 3, 4 and 1 word per line respectively. Only do this with a team in which people enjoy working with each other. It's a wonderful activity to do with a team that is disbanding at the end of a project as a way to commerate the good times.

Hand out pens and paper and read out the instructions:
'We are going to each write a poem with 5 lines. Each line has a specific number of words. Don't worry, I'll guide you through each line, one by one. Write down 1 word that comes to mind when you think about our team (a feeling, a color, ...).
On the next line, describe this feeling with 2 words.
On the next line, add details with 3 words – What is it like? How does it smell or sound? What would you like to add?
On line 4, write down a sentence with 4 words, starting with 'I'. What do you associate with your feeling.
Take a moment to read your poem thus far. What 1 word comes to mind? This is the final word of your poem on line 5.'

Now you can go around and everybody who wants to, can read out their poem. Bring tissues, it can be quite moving.

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Temperature Reading (#22)

Delay Display (#127)

Braver (#145)

Low Hanging Fruit (#63)

Elevenie (#144)

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Created by Corinna Baldauf

Co-developed by Timon Fiddike