Draw the iteration

I would like to share with you an exercise that I've tried lately with my teams during our sprint retrospective.

The exercise is through drawing which represents a very creative way of expressing feelings.

We had a very challenging sprint and in order to increase team bonding and team morale's, I was thinking about a different facilitation technique for the sprint retrospective

I started the retro by kindly asking each team member to think about something remarkable from the last sprint and to drawing it.

Even there were many reactions in the beginning, the team members agreed and started to draw what was remarkable for them during the iteration.

After each of them finished, I collected the drawings and one by one I added them on the wall.
I asked each of the team members to guess what each artist wanted to say by the drawing or how seems that she or he felt during the sprint.

When all the team members expressed their idea about each drawing, the artist added more details to complete the interpretation

You can see below some of the team members drawings:

Very interesting, right?

After the drawings discussion we collected ideas and started to brainstorm on what can be improved for the next sprint.

My inspiration came from Thorsten Kalnin's article but I adapted to my context.

This exercise brought a lot of energy and a shared understanding related to how the iteration was for the team.

It was very fun and what I notice is how much can a drawing tell about a team member's mood or opinion.

I recommend you to try this exercise when you are running out of ideas, when you want to increase your team's energy or why not, when you want a fun retrospective.