Retros against humanity 🃏

This is the 14th Petals snapshot of spring 2024. And today I'm going to want to talk about a retrospective format that was quite useful to do with one of our teams yesterday. So for those who are familiar with the game cards against humanity, it's a bit of a risky card game, definitely not for children. There's a great retrospective format called Retros against Humanity by a company called Box UK. I'll put a link in the show notes now, it's a little bit risky at times, so you need to make sure that your team are in a good place. They've got a strong rapport, they know each other really well, they know the boundaries to push. Luckily, I'm in that place with my team, but I know not all teams are in that situation at the time, so I thought I'd give it a go. What we tend to do is every fortnight we'll have a retrospective looking back at the previous sprint, what we've achieved and what we want to do next. So it kind of shoehorns the kind of the good, the bad and the what ifs into a cardiac humanity theme. What I really enjoyed, though, was just seeing how the team bounced off each other. One of the great examples was don't feed gizmo after midnight or you may end up with blank. And then they'd put in some of their bad examples that would come out from the brainstorming session. There was a general theme around one specific incident that someone didn't mind having a joke about either. It came out on most selections that we did on the exercise, but again, for me, it was just wonderful to see the team coming together, realizing the themes and having a bit of a laugh. The actions were a bit difficult to kind of identify from this model. There was a couple that we can. I'm going to definitely paraphrase for the team, rather than it coming straight out of the conversations, but again, it was just a great way to kind of mix things up a little bit. When you get into that stagnant retrospective mode, you feel like it's just a box ticking exercise. Shake it up, find a different format. There's plenty inspiration out there. I found this one through a little browse over lunchtime and it went down really well. It's nice that you can do it in person. You can do it virtually. We've managed to do a hybrid version just about. It's great teamwork evidence for me yesterday just to see the team play with this format, have a bit of a laugh with it, and then just see if we want to use things like this in the future. I'll be back again tomorrow with another petals snapshot.