Begin the Retrospective with shadow shows!
Good mood + team-building
This article is a translation. The original article in French can be found here.
A big thanks goes to Nathan Navarro and Gnandou Souleymane© for the cover picture!
We kicked off our last Retrospective with an atypical activity: putting up shadow shows and guessing which Agile Manifesto value or principle it depicts.
The Shadow Show Activity
The activity starts by grouping participants in teams. Each team randomly picks 2 subjects out of the 16 Agile Manifesto values and principles. (4 values + 12 principles)
The team selects, at their discretion, one of the two subjects to put up a shadow show where other teams will guess the subject.
Teams are provided with tools and materials to build their shadow puppets: paper, cardboard, scissors, glue, sticky tape, little sticks… The teams are allocated a 5-minutes timeslot to prepare the show.
How to run the shows? Use a video projector to display a white background and let the teams take turn to roll out their shows! The teams must abide to the following rules: — no speaking — sound effects and animal noises are allowed — puppets can move — puppets can be made by simply moving the hands, cardboard is not mandatory.
Each team has also been handed out a full copy of the Agile Manifesto values and principles: the first team to guess which one matches the shadow show earns 1 point! But be careful, each team only has one guess per show! As for the team putting up the show, they also earn 1 point if their subject has been guessed!
Requirements
First of all, you need a good ol’ video projector which is usually found in most of the meeting rooms.
As you’ll want a proper white background during the shows, just prepare in advance an empty slide. I went a little further by reminding the goal of the activity on top of the slide: Which Agile Manifesto value or pinciple? Obviously, this sentence depends on the theme of the subjects that must be guessed.
Then you’ll need stuff to craft the shadow puppets: sticks, paper, cardboard, strings…
Finally you’ll need many tools to form and put together the shadow puppets: scissors, knifes, glue, sticky tape, staples, paper clips, rulers…
Do not hesitate to gather as much tools as possible by borrowing them. Providing each team with a pair of scissors would be the absolute minimum!
I forgot to mention the obvious things: such an activity requires chairs and tables! Thus the typical meeting room will be the perfect place.
Setup
So now that all the physical stuff has been taken care of, we need to prepare the subjects for the guessing game. The theme we chose was the Agile Manifesto: guess its 4 values and its 12 principles.
I printed them on paper sheets, folded the sheets and put them in a bag. Ready to be drawn randomly!
I also printed one copy of the Agile Manifesto per team: let’s not be too sadistic and accept that they might not yet know it by heart.
Are you good to go? The stuff is ready, the room has been booked, the subjects to guess are in a bag? Let’s roll!
Action
The teams
The first step is forming the teams.
We have a little tradition: we use the opening activity of the Retrospective meetings as a way to keep a strong bond between the several teams that make up the Player project. While each project team conducts the other activities on their own, all the project teams take part together in the same opening activity.
So to form the activity teams, we simply re-used the project teams. This created a healthy competition between them!
As a general rule, I would recommend to avoid forming teams of more than 4 people. I believe that such a team would find it difficult to organize itself given that the exercice only lasts from 5 to 10 minutes.
Drawing the subjects
Each team draws two subjects from the bag. The team then chooses which subject it will make the other teams guess.
Time’s counted: run for the stuff
The facilitator announces loudly that the teams have 5 minutes to create their shadow show that will make guess their subject.
He also shows where are the various materials and tools that the teams can use.
The teams will naturally run to grab stuff to make their show. But the goal is also to take possession of the best tools before the other teams. (we are not all equal when it comes to a single sticky tape dispenser)
Creating the shows
The 5 minutes flies and the shadow puppets are coming to life.
Maybe a few more minutes are requested as not all the teams are done. Or on the contrary just cut it up and that’s too bad for the laggards: it’s your call!
On stage!
The teams take turns to play their shows.
The rules:
- No speaking, but sound effects are allowed
- The other teams can try to guess only once per show; if they are wrong, they can’t guess again
- If a team sucessfully guesses, then this team and the team playing the show both earn 1 point
- The team playing the show earns no point if nobody managed to guess!
Close the activity by congratulating the team that scored the most points!
Conclusion
This activity is a great way to generate a good mood as a Retrospective opening!
Make sure you have enough time to run this activity, at the very least over a quarter of an hour. If you are in a rush, other Retrospective opening activities can be finished in 5 minutes tops.
Beyond the Retrospective: an ice-breaker
In the end, this activity would be a perfect fit for many other situations as an ice-breaker.
At first sight I would say that this ice-breaker is a good fit for groups made of between 6 and 40 people, by fiddling with the number of teams and the number of people in each team. 6 people would form 3 teams of 2 people while 40 people would form 10 teams of 4 people. Depending on the number of teams, you must adjust the time required by the activity: while the creation of the shows would still be bounded to 5–10 minutes, the actual show and guessing parts are directly proportional to the number of teams since they are taking turns.
And the theme of the subjects to guess is of course not restricted to the Agile Manifesto!
About Jean-Pierre Lambert
I used to be a software engineer with a stronger interest in quality and business value than in tools and technical design. Hopefully I am now helping teams as Test Facilitator and Scrum Master instead.
Hoping to see you again on this blog to follow my adventures!
