A moment of appreciation in your retrospectives

We seldom pay attention to the people behind the facts, and at how much important the presence of a colleague was, during the sprint. Retrospectives might be perfect to highlight appreciations for our colleagues. Here I will describe a format with the purpose to help your team to do so!

The purpose of this retrospective is to help the team to gather as much information as possible about the sprint (or iteration), to clearly visualize the most relevant facts that have concerned the sprint, and to have a better ground to think of which topics will be likely highlight later, during the retrospective.

If you are wondering when is it suitable to run a retrospective like this, I will be glad to provide my suggestion, and based on my personal experience I would recommend you, and your team, to try out this format in these circumstances:

• The team is already familiar with the Lean Coffee format. ¹
• Retrospectives happens on Monday (or on the first day of the working week). ²

The format

Yes, this retrospective is “100% remote-friendly”. It works really well on remote teams.

This was one of the retrospective we experimented with this format. Trello did a good job. Click on the image to access the full size.

The picture shows an instant of the retrospective, and a brief description of all stages. Consider taking some time, open the image at its full size, and take a look at it.

The time duration for this retrospective is 1 hour or less.

You can prepare a physical board, or using a digital one (like Trello or Miro), with all the needed areas, and try to better highlight them.

I have not tried yet, but an idea might be to have two physical boards, one for the Information Gathering, and another for the Lean Coffee.

The structure

The format is structured around three different subsequent stages:

• Information Gathering
• Lean Coffee
• Agree on an Action

Information Gathering

• The previous retrospective action (few minutes)
  The team, or the people in charge of the previous action, will provide a brief update of it.
• A moment of appreciation (~8 minutes)
  It is an exercise that each member of the team has to do. Trying to figure out a few words of appreciation for the people or facts that were very helpful for the success of the sprint.
• What I did not like (~8 minutes)
  Each team member will write down all the things they didn’t find of any value for the sprint.
• What I liked! (~8 minutes)
  Each team member will write down all the things they liked during the sprint. Everything that was valuable for the sprint.

Lean Coffee

• The whole team will take a few minutes to review the information previously gathered.
• Start the Lean Coffee (~25 minutes)

Agree on an Action

• Find an action based on the topics discussed (5 minutes)

Conclusion and learnings …

That’s all, folks!

I hope you will give this retrospective a chance and try it out in your team, and I am curious to listen your feedback, what worked, what not and what you think could be improved in this format.

After having run this retrospective format for a couple of times, I think I learned that creating a dedicated room to gather the appreciations is a very powerful tool. It is always nice to remember and recognize that our work is driven by people, and give or receive sincere appreciation is a good way to:

• Understand what others have appreciated.
• Understand what are the habits we should preserve, or do more of.
• Having a starting ground to reassemble the relevant facts of the sprint.