3 retrospective methods & team workshops with a surprise effect
Do you want your boss to love you? Well, then increase the performance of your team! Go from being an average car to being an explosive rocket.
How? Download my free and science based eBook on " Reaching team flow in 12 easy steps " and take is seriously. But now let's get to the actual topic of this text.
As a Scrum Master or generally as a moderator of a retrospective, you are faced with the great challenge, again and again to develop new retrospective methodsthat fit the teams and that noticeably help the teams to develop.
In the best case, you even create the surprise effect and use an interactive and creative method to tease out something that was previously not visible. That is not always easy!
As a Spin-off of the psychological faculty of the University of Münster we are developing a software tool that supports Scrum Masters in retrospectives - to provide a remedy at this point, among other things. Our focus is on making more psychological know-how accessible to Scrum Masters. We want to develop a Retromat - with methods from psychology.
With our tool you can get anonymous feedback from your team on specific statements or items (eg “I have the freedom to do my work efficiently.”) And open questions (“What has slowed you down lately?”), their results then automatically for the retro in a full workshop be processed using our tool. These statements are not just accidental ideas. Christian, our psychologist on the team, has Research results with several hundred thousand participants thinned to identify behavioral anchors that make truly successful teams.
Based on this, we have compiled a general item pool of over 90 statements. To help you use this in a targeted manner, we would also like to present you with some specific combinations of items - including exercises - that to concrete core challenges from teams.
Below you will find three corresponding retrospective methods of Echometer. They will really take you further!
Retrospective methods: retro workshops with Echometer
1. Better teamwork through team goals
There is hardly a technique in psychology that is more suitable to provide more motivation: good goals. In some companies it is still common to say: “Do your best.” It is proven: Specific, ambitious goals almost always lead to higher performance.
Click here to find the right workshop format.
2. With mental models for better communication in the team
People look at the world through different filters. When you look at a picture, many would look at it from different angles - and talk about it differently. Depending on the filter. And that’s exactly why communication often goes wrong. What to do?
Click here for the workshop , which helps you develop a common “mental model.”
3. Question assumptions & start thinking outside the box
Teams tend to only incrementally improve at some point. And that’s good for now. But at the same time you sometimes have familiar behaviors with which you have come to terms. Here it is difficult to break out of the rut. Then it’s time for a workshop that opens your eyes and encourages lateral thinking.
This workshop will help you to re-examine implicit assumptions about your own work!
4. Try Echometer some day
Another method for your retro is of course retro tools - why not use what’s there?
In particular, I want to mention the retrospective tool Echometer name, which I helped to develop myself. It combines insights from psychology with agile best practices to get the most out of team health checks & retros for team development.
We have an entire database of retro methods - and it can be used both online remotely and offline.
The basic version is free. If you just want to try it out - right here or start for free.
What do you think about our retrospective methods?
We hope that at least one of these workshops fits your team’s current challenges. If not, we look forward to your feedback on the challenge we can help with.
