 Good food. The topic for this retrospective is around helping a team access their creativity and encouraging them to examine parts of their process that could benefit from a more innovative approach. You will need the following resources a flip-chart pad, large piece of paper or whiteboard, some large and regular sized sticky notes, some blank writing paper and some marker pens. We also need a large bucket box or bowl for balls of paper to be thrown into and a wooden spoon if we can to stir them. Hook. Explain to the team the goal for this retrospective with the following hook. This retrospective is designed to help us find new ingredients to increase our appetite for innovation, make work more tasty and get us cooking on gas. As always feel free to get creative yourself and come up with an alternative here. Explain that this retrospective is likely to take 90 minutes or so and we're involved writing on sticky notes, working in pairs or small groups and then to consolidating as a larger group. Events. Moving on to the events section here. We firstly want the team to think about all the elements of a balanced diet. So we're thinking in terms of the major food groups such as meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables, sugars and fats or water perhaps and write each of those food groups into bold letters on large sticky notes and place them onto the wall. Explain to the team that every sprint usually contains a mixture of types of work just as a person's balanced diet contains a mixture of food groups. Ask the team to imagine the types of work that they get typically involved with during the sprint and write them onto normal sized sticky notes and think about what food group they might belong to. For example, the basics of planning and retrospectives might fall into the meat or vegetables categories. Place these sticky notes under the appropriate food group heading and cluster and consolidate any similar ones. For example, bugs, defects and supports could be consolidated. Explain that we're going to now explore the recipe we use for each of the items of work. Split a foot chart into three columns. In the first column write the word kitchen. Here we're going to ask the team what the environment they're using here. What tools or utensils are we using to help us do our work? In the second column write the word ingredients. Here we're looking for who or what we need to use in this event or process. For example, in support we might need a product owner, one or two team members, some details of the support issue and access to the live system to investigate the issue. In the third column write the word method. Walk through the current steps with the team. Go through in detail writing them onto the flip chart as you go. Take care to always write exactly what the team members are saying. Meaning, if you are in any way like me when it comes to cooking I tend to stick to the same old recipes that I know and I rarely try anything new. The same could be true of your own team who may have been running a planning session or a daily stand-up meeting in the same way for a long time. In this part of the retrospective we'd like to introduce a chance to try and make those recipes a little bit different and hopefully a little bit more creative. Invite the team to look back over the previous recipe that they just described and look for opportunities to change parts of it. We can challenge the team to make their dish more interesting or maybe even combine some ingredients they had never imagined can be used together before. Haven't you ever tried curried sprouts or bacon flavoured ice cream? Let's look at an example of how this might work. Kitchen. Could we try using a different tool to achieve the same result? If we fry steak in a skillet, for example how about using a barbecue instead? How else could we change the kitchen environment? Ingredients. Which ingredients could we add or take away? Could we add blackberries to our apple pie? What benefits could we gain from changing the attendees of a meeting or a session? Method. How can we change our process here? Should we be repeating some steps or is there a step missing? Should we allow one part of the meeting to run longer? Once this aspect of our work has been explored and some ideas for improvement have been identified encourage the team to break up into smaller groups and run the same process for other work items. Else. We can have very different ideas about what creativity really means and what we regard as creative people. One extension activity here you could consider is to play a simple word association game where each team member takes it in terms to shout out a word. The next person must make a connection with the previous word as quickly as they can. As a facilitator, attempt to write the words down in a random fashion on a piece of flip chart paper as you hear them. Once you have 10 to 15 words written on the flip chart, stop the game and ask the team to silently reflect on the words they see for 10 seconds. Then ask the question. What can we learn from the creativity of others? Summarize the responses as a list of creative principles for the team to reference when they close the retrospective. Decisions. Now we have exercised our creative muscles during this exercise. We want to capture some of that learning in the form of a few actions that will allow those ideas to be implemented. Those ideas are going to form ingredients that the team will throw into a cooking pot for the next sprint. To do this, arrange the team on chairs in a circle around a large box or bucket which is going to act as our cooking pot. If you have an actual cooking pot, this would be perfect. Then ask each team member to write down suggestions or ingredients, if you like, for achievable actions to implement in the next sprint, which will increase our creativity. Ask them to write each suggestion down on a sticky note or a scrap of paper. When the team have written one, ask them to screw it up into a tight ball and throw it into the pot. All suggestions remain anonymous. Once all the ingredients are in the pot, give it a good stir with a spoon and pull one out at random. Read the suggestion out to the team. Ask for clarification if it needs it, and then ask for a volunteer chef to take on this activity in the next sprint. I would suggest that you repeat this for another couple of ingredients in the bowl, taking care to stir it well before you pick another one. When the team are comfortable with two or three actions and each have volunteer chefs to own them, close the retrospective.