Improving Agile Retrospectives: Helping Teams Become More Efficient, 1/e

5From the Metaphor to the Retrospective

After facilitating some retrospectives, you’ll find that you have hit a wall in your efforts to keep them varied. If you’re always wanting to try something new, there simply aren’t enough good ideas for fresh retrospectives. There’s nothing for it then, but to come up with some activities of your own.

Using theme-based metaphors is a very effective method for “inventing” new ways to lead retrospectives. You can draw these themes from practically everything: from cars to xylophones. The best themes are those that you, or someone around you, knows well. After you’ve decided on a theme, you can start to come up with activities relevant to the theme’s context. The first step is to make a list of all the terms ...