Agile Retrospectives Blog

Engaging Retrospective - A Fun Way To Engage With The Team In Your Retrospective

Written by Luis Gonçalves | Apr 12, 2023 5:26:22 AM

Engaging Retrospective - Twitterspective

Engaging retrospective - the Twitterspective is a paper-based social media-like retrospective exercise that can be used to gather data and generate insight from the team. It borrows parts from a different social media channels and mixes them into one. This is a fun way to engage with the team through a familiar mean.

How does it work? 

Before doing this exercise expect to see people smiling or giggling as you explain they will participate in a social media simulation on paper. In this exercise, everyone needs to be heard and will have their opinions accepted by their co-workers.

Once the Twitterspective Feeds starts to be filled up with post-its, the peers will be reacting to each post in real time.

I recommend using this exercise after your warm-up activity. This is a good exercise to change your traditional retrospectives. It gives a good opportunity to both shy and outgoing team members to be heard.

Instructions

1. Prepare post-its for each participant

2. Make sure you have a whiteboard, window, or a wall space that is large enough to place plenty of Post-its. This will act as your ‘Twitterspective Feed’

3. Ask the team: “If you were to express your opinion on a social media channel about the last Sprint (or any other chosen topic) what would you say?”

4. Allow 5-10 minutes of silent writing and ask the team to include hashtags about their ideas

5.  Ask the team to post their "Tweets" on the Twitterspective feed.

[caption id="attachment_11925" align="alignleft" width="321"] Source: Anthony Petrucci[/caption]

6.  As a facilitator, you will read each post-it, one at a time, and have each team member to: 1) comment on the post-it (Give them 2 minutes to write their comment) 2) ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the post. Please note – the author of the post DOES NOT comment or like/dislike his own post.

7. As a team, go through each post along with its associated comments. Take the conversation a little deeper when necessary. This conversation should not be longer than 40 minutes.

8. You should gather the team´s ideas during the discussion.

Timeline

Explanation/Introduction (1-3 minutes)

Writing Tweets (5-10 minutes)

Tweet and comment evaluation/discussion (30– 40 minutes; only allow 1-2 minutes to write each comment)

Conclusion – Identify and gather outcomes (5 minutes)

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