Retrospectives are invaluable for Scrum teams as they provide a dedicated space for team members to openly reflect on their recent work, discuss successes and challenges, and identify areas for improvement. For an Agile Coach, retrospectives are essential for uncovering recurring issues or patterns that may hinder the team’s progress, such as communication barriers, process inefficiencies, or gaps in collaboration. By facilitating these sessions, an Agile Coach creates a safe environment where team members feel empowered to share their perspectives, allowing the team to collectively acknowledge areas for growth. Through this process, the coach and team can collaboratively generate actionable solutions, fostering continuous improvement, stronger team cohesion, and ultimately, greater efficiency in reaching their goals.

Recently, during a team co-location event, I facilitated a unique retrospective session to help one of my teams to reflect on and improve our collaboration and address some of our recurring challenges. As my teams are all remote and located in different cities and countries, this co-location event was a good opportunity to let one of my teams to brainstorm on ideas in person and do this in actual physical breakout rooms. Everything is simply also possible as remote, using remote breakout rooms on e.g. MS Teams. But expressing feelings and emotions during a physical face-to-face breakout session makes the conversations and discussions more interactive and helps the team members build stonger bonds with each other. 

This event offered an opportunity to connect in person, share perspectives openly, and work toward solutions. To maximize engagement and creativity, I used an interactive approach and the activity cards that allowed everyone to contribute their ideas actively. These activity cards are made especially for Software Development teams to brainstorm on their issues and come up with best possible solution ideas and actions.

The activity cards are called "Cards for Analyzing and Reflecting on Doomed Software" and can also be found as digital on cards42.org, which is managed by INNOQ. One of my friends introduced me with cards42, which she learned about during an international conference. As I explored the cards, I found them suitable to start conversations and let the team brainstorm on the topics that are suggested on the cards. Which ended up surprisingly progressive and we came up with actionable results.

For this retrospective I prepared 3 Breakout rooms, physical rooms at the office, using breakout group names to make it more playful. I prepared enough papers with the breakout group names so that the team members could select their rooms and breakout group mates. They selected only one folded paper piece to locate their breakout group.