The Worlds Worst Retrospective
How could we make our team morale worse?
Leverage the power of Reverse brainstorming to help your team improve. Reverse brainstorming is a facilitation technique that can help teams to discover different solutions to their problems. It leverages our negativity bias; our innate ability to more easily see problems, than solutions.
Access the Miro template below, plug & play into your own instances and let me know how you get on!
How does it work?
1. Crowdsource the most important challenge the team is facing, this could be their number of defects, team morale or communication.2. Invite the team to think about how they could make that problem worse.
3. Use these to identify improvements the team could try going forwards.
Use the below table as an example of reverse brain storming topics, the ideas converted ideas and the corresponding actions
Reverse brainstorming ideas | Converted ideas | Action identified |
Being unaware of how we’re progressing as a team | Committing to regular retrospectives to inspect and adapt how we work | Simon to schedule retrospectives on a twice monthly cadence starting from the next iteration |
Discussing improvements but not actioning them | Adding improvements identified at retros directly to our backlog and revisiting them regularly | Charity to add retro actions directly onto the backlog straight after the retrospective. We’ll revisit them daily in our syncs |
Not taking into account the whole team's perspective, single dominant voices taking over discussions | Ensuring to check what the whole team thinks before making a decision OR using a decision making protocol that the team is happy with | Team to experiment with the decider protocol for decision making starting from the next iteration |
Cutting corners with the quality of our work, focusing on getting more stuff released over quality | Building quality into our we work as a team, every change is peer reviewed before release | Each team member to ensure their code is peer reviewed before something is considered to be ‘Done’ |