Sailboat

How to do it

This retrospective is quite simple. First, we draw a SailBoat, rocks, clouds and couple of islands like it is shown on the picture on a flip chart.

The islands represent teams´ goals/vision. They work every day to achieve these islands. The rocks represent the risks they might encounter towards their vision.

The anchor on the SailBoat is everything that is slowing them down on their journey. The clouds and the wind represent everything that is helping them to reach their goal.

Having the picture on the wall, write what the team vision is or what are goals as a team. After that, start a brainstorming session with the team allowing them to dump their ideas within different areas.

Give ten minutes to write their ideas. Afterwards, give 5 minutes to each person to read out loud their ideas.

At this point discuss together with the team how can they continue to practice what was written on the “clouds” area. These are good ideas that help the team, and they need to continue with these ideas.

Then spend some time discussing how can the team mitigate the risks that were identified. Finally, together with the team chose the most important issue that is slowing the team down. If you do not find an agreement within the team about the most important topic that should be tackled, you can use vote dots. In the end, you can define what steps can be done to fix the problem, and you can close the retrospective.

If you do not find an agreement within the team about the most important topic that should be tackled, you can use vote dots. In the end, you can define what steps can be done to fix the problem, and you can close the retrospective.

Like many other exercises, this exercise does not require a collocation of a team. You can use, for example, tools like Lino, to apply the exercise to non-collocated teams. This tool allows us to do everything that we need to run this exercise.