Silent Retrospective
In May 2018 during XP Conference Porto I got a chance to participate in a workshop from Lula & Romeu about Extreme visual thinking.
The workshop had one main mission — a message to reach the audience:
“You don’t have to be Shakespeare to say you know HOW to write…”
“Neither you have to be DaVinci to say you know HOW to draw!”
What was a unique experience was that the workshop was held in silent mode without saying a single word, communication was done only by drawing.
It was the first time for me having a meeting and NOT talking. Therefore people paid more attention and expressed themselves in a simpler way.
I don’t speak Portuguese, however, at Talkdesk I work with one team who asked me to have meetings in their mother language so that they would be able to express themselves better.
I was thinking of how to overcome the language barrier during Retrospective — a meeting to inspect and adapt our way of working, improve the team dynamics. Fundamentally a meeting where is required a lot of sharing and communicating.
Inspired from the conference I suggested— LET’S NOT TALK AT ALL!
And the idea of Silent Retrospective was born.
The D-Day
I invited the team to the Retrospective but I didn’t provide any details beforehand because I wanted to share the same excitement which I experienced at the workshop.
I also asked for help from my peers Agile Coaches Diogo and Pedro with facilitation.
Welcome
As the team was entering the Retrospective I played a song and drew the “Keep Silence” sign to show this meeting would be in silent mode.
Introduce co-facilitators!
Then I drew faces of Pedro and Diogo to introduce them to the team saying they will be participating in the meeting as well.
Social Contract
In the beginning, we introduced 3 rules which will be followed.
- The meeting will take one hour,
- No talking is allowed,
- When the music stops, look at the facilitator — that’s a clever way how to facilitate the group activity without talking.
Energizer
A good way to make your team feel comfortable about not talking, only drawing, and also to create a safe environment to express their opinions, is to start with an energizer.
Usually, people who are not used to drawing start to panic. Making the process natural and iterative helps participants relax and become less shy about their drawing skills.
- Icebreaker — Pick a post-it and draw the eyes of the person on your right. (This is also a good exercise to get to know each other a little bit better. How often otherwise do you look so deeply into other people’s eyes? :))
Then we asked the team:
“Do you know how to write?” Everyone nodded yes!
“Do you know how to draw?” A few people nodded yes, the rest of the team didn’t.
Start from the basics:
Values
When the team was feeling comfortable drawing we challenged them to express more difficult words — the team values. The result was breathtaking, seeing all the amazing and creative variations for the same word!
This was just a warm-up for the following exercise.
Lean Coffee
We split the team into four groups based on the hero from the Justice League.
Then we asked them to draw any pain they feel in their team on A3 paper which was placed on the wall.
By dot voting, they chose the biggest pain and afterward they drew a pill that would heal the pain.
Feedback
“Pick a post-it and express how did you like this retrospective by drawing a type of weather,” we asked for feedback at the end of the session. We received a lot of sunshine for the session! Yay!
To sum up
- Drawing is not only for kids neither DaVinci,
- visual thinking brings simplification and clarity to the conversation,
- sketching encourages people to think out of the box.
