Explorer-Shopper-Vacationer-Prisoner helps understand people’s attitudes toward the retrospective. Useful for a facilitator in a new/unknown group to test the waters. Being anonymous, it should encourage honest responses and help improve the retro itself (e.g. with working agreements).
Duration: 10-20 minutes
- Explorer: eager to discover new ideas and hindsights. They will learn everything they can about the iteration/release/project
- Shopper: will look over the available information and will be happy to go home with one new useful idea
- Vacationer: not interested in the work of the retrospective, but happy to be away from the daily grind. They may pay attention, but are mostly glad to not be working
- Prisoner: feel they have been force to attend and would rather do something else
Steps
- Explain that you’re taking a poll to learn how people view their participation in the retrospective
- Distribute slips/cards to record the attitude toward learning in the retro
- they must fold the paper in half for their privacy
- remote: private chat or anonymous tool to share their word (e.g. slido poll?)
- Collect the responses and mix them
- Ask a participant to tick physical/virtual histogram as you read the responses
- Refer to the histogram and ask the group “what do you make of this data?“. Then lead a brief discussion about how the attitudes will influence the retro
- Debrief, asking: How are these categories like our attitudes toward daily work?
- If there are prisoners, ask the group for suggestions on how to make the retro more valuable.
- propose usign as working agreement any suggestion that comes
- (optional) in some cases, you can invite prisoners to skip the session, with the caveat that the remaining participants may make decisions that affect them