Emotional retrospecting is me trying to stimulate participants into talking more from a personal and emotional point of view.
So how did you feel about that? What did that do to you?
I have seen teams growing and understanding each other more after everyone heard what a certain event actually did to that person.
A great idea on retrospecting is to make use of the ‘Event Box’.
For an ‘Event Box’, we use a normal cardboard box where we put in a thought, a feeling or an event that occurred during the iteration.
- Each participant writes down a though, a feeling or an event.
- Each person takes out a single card/piece of paper and reads it out loud.
- The person that item belongs to talks a bit about it.
This form of retrospecting tends to be more from an emotional point of view, but you might find that we’re still talking about items that influenced the iteration, whether it’s in a positive or negative way.
One of the big advantages is that the participants are even more stimulated to talk about an emotion.
Why is bringing emotions to the table a good idea?
We don’t want to make this a therapy session but we do want to stimulate the group feeling. I think I don’t need to explain the power of a group that is dedicated to the mission and each other 😉.
I hope this post might encourage you to do something with it in your next retrospective. If you tried it, I would love to know the outcome!