Traveling Carnival Retrospective

Description of the workshop

The Traveling Carnival Retrospective is an original creation, designed to highlight tedious activities that do not provide sufficient added value. This format is better for a team that already has some experience in agile retrospectives since it covers a wide range of categories.

The retrospective is structured around four quadrants:

The Claw Machine illustrates actions that take time, which can be tedious or repetitive, and which do not provide a satisfactory return on investment;
The Big Wheel wheel symbolizes the height of view on daily work, which gives us meaning and additional motivation. This can come, for example, from social or environmental impact, technological progress, etc.;
The Cotton Candy represents things that stimulate us, nourish us intellectually, and bring us pleasure or satisfaction;
The Bumper Cars embody the obstacles we face that prevent us from moving forward or slow us down, the things that are painful.

How to run the Traveling Carnival Retrospective

The Traveling Carnival Retrospective consists of 8 steps:

Step 1: Presentation of the workshop and reminder of the framework

The facilitator introduces the workshop to the team, highlighting the four categories, and emphasizes the values of a retrospective framework: transparency, kindness, equality of speaking time within the team, and confidentiality with external stakeholders.

Step 2 : Ice breaker

The workshop starts with an icebreaker where the participants choose an image that best represents the sprint that just passed. They can add a picture of another ride if none of the given pictures illustrates what they think.

Participants then comment on their choice in a few words.

Step 3: Individual reflection

For around ten minutes, participants reflect individually and propose a maximum of two ideas per category, with at least one proposal for each category. They can use the polling booth mode to prevent anchoring bias.

At the end of the reflection period, each participant reveals their proposals and comments on them. use this time to clarify certain points and remove any ambiguities.

Step 4: Selection of topics to address

Before initiating the vote, the facilitator groups together proposals of the same nature.

Then, participants are invited to cast their votes on the topics that seem most relevant to them, the objective being to keep only 3 topics.

Step 5: Ideation and selection of improvement actions

Once the topics have been selected, participants are invited to think individually about ideas for action for 5 minutes.

Once the reflection period is over, the facilitator once again organizes a vote to select the 3 most relevant actions.

Step 6: Refine actions

Step 6 consists of refining, if necessary, the proposed actions, i.e., making them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic, and Time-bound).

Step 7: Define someone in charge for each action

The team distributes the actions that have been selected. Each action must have one unique assignee that will guarantee that the action will be carried out by the next retrospective. It is not necessarily the person who will perform the action.