I personally think Retrospectives are one of the most important ceremonies in Scrum. These are the key sessions to facilitate continuous improvement and help develop good teams. I often see some “Scrum Masters” carry out retrospectives in very repetitive manner and look at is as a chore as opposed to a valuable learning session. This is an easy trap to fall into, as predominantly you are looking at similar ways to gather data each time. This might work sometimes, but repetition like everything else can be boring. Start going down this route and you will struggle to get good quality feedback and engagement from the team, rendering the retrospective as an administrative routine task with little value to anyone.
With that thought in mind, a friend and Scrum Master colleague of mine James Scrimshire, created the ‘Banana Retrospective’. At first I thought he was drinking from the wrong coffee machine, but then after hearing about his success with it and the reasoning behind it, I thought I’d give it a try when the time was right with team. I liked the idea of expression through the use of an avatar and the idea mildly reminded me of the movie ‘The Beaver’ starring Mel Gibson which was quite interesting from a psychological point of view.
A retrospective was approaching with a team who had recently gone through a new product launch and had suffered some pressure and conditions of non-sustainable pace as well as some other problems. It was fair to say the team may have been suffering from fatigue as well as some of the other expected conditions when pressures from above are applied. It was time to get the team back on the right track with Scrum and it was important to have a good level of engagement in the retrospective to help identify the path of improvement as a team. It was time to try the ‘Banana Retrospective’.
As described, I got some bananas ready including appropriate pens to draw on the banana skins for each of the team members and introduced them to the session. As you can imagine the idea was met with a lot of banter and laughter. This was a great start, before the bananas had been introduced energy levels were low, but that soon changed. There were initially some members who were cautious about the idea, but they relaxed and embraced it more so when others starting getting into the swing of it. However it was clear that some embraced it a lot more than others.
The session kicked off with each team member converting their banana into their emotions from the last sprint. From an artistic point of view it was very interesting to see the different approaches. The bananas ranged from simple facial expressions to mapped events through the previous sprint.
With each banana converted, each team member had the floor to talk about their banana. Each time a banana was introduced, there was laughter in the room which helped increase the level of engagement. These were then captured on a flipchart and discussed between the team. Each team member had a turn and the emotions varied considerably and those which had similarities were expressed quite differently.
In review of the retrospective, I would put this down as a success. If the timing is right and you have the right team dynamic, it will work well. The bananas acted as avatars to capture emotion as intended. I personally think that this helped the team relax a little more and discuss issues more openly. It also injected fun into the room which helped with levels of engagement. Evidently the flip chart was full of captured issues the team identified which were very valuable and used in the following planning session. I also had good feedback after the session from some team members saying that they enjoyed it.
So if you are looking for a different, powerful and effective way to run a retrospective whilst injecting a bit of fun, give this one a try. It might be worth considering using mixed fruit varieties rather than just bananas, but if you take this route make sure to have the correct pens to hold the ink on their surface.