 Science The topic of this retrospective is experimentation. This time we intend to use the retrospective itself to experiment with some new ideas the team has, and use that time to find a tangible output, particularly where there's little time to do that within the project itself. You will need the following resources, some flip chart paper and markers, and you will also need three spinning wheel templates, blue, red, and green, which you can download from the file section. You'll need to create these in advance of the retrospective, but they are quite simple. To make these spinning wheels you'll need some card, some glue, a pair of scissors, and some thumb tacks or drawing pins. The hook for this particular retrospective centres around the theme of science and experimentation. Here's the example that you could use here. This retrospective will be different to most other retrospectives you've seen before. Today, we're not just going to talk about what needs to change, we're actually going to run some experiments that will result in a change. All within this time box meeting. We do suggest that you stick to your retrospective time box that you'd normally use, which could be between two or three hours. Because this is a creative exercise, you may need to ask attendees to come prepared with some ideas in order to kick-start the process. Events. We expect that different teams will all have different experiments that they'd like to run, but here we've condensed that into four different types of experiment. Understand. Something we could benefit from learning more about, to increase the knowledge we have within the team. Add. Something we could add to how we work, to benefit us in the future. Edit. Something we want to change. And remove. Something we can eliminate in order to simplify our work. In order to choose the type of experiment to run, we suggest an exciting game of chance at this point. Each type of experiment has been added to our Wheel of Chance template that you can download as part of this video. By printing this template and sticking it onto a card, you can recreate a simple spinning wheel by piercing the centre of the wheel with a pin or a thumbtack. The wheel should then spin freely when you put it onto a table or a flat surface. Use the arrow to determine which type of experiment the wheel stopped spinning on. Once the type of experiment has been decided by the Wheel of Chance, we also need to pick the subject for the experiment. Here we suggest four subjects for the team to choose from. Part of the product we could work on. This could be an individual feature or maybe a defect or even how the product functions itself. Process. An element of our process that we follow as a team. This could be meetings, such as sprint planning or a more detailed analysis of how we triage our defects, for example. Environment. Here we mean the team's surroundings. This could be the tools that we use to help us. It could be the equipment that we have on our desks or even the brand of coffee that we drink as a team. Values. The human aspect of our work. Revisiting our values regularly is a worthwhile exercise for any team to do to ensure how they should be able to move their work forward. We've included another template with these subject types on it to encourage you to create another Wheel of Chance using similar fashion to give you the experiment type to use. I mentioned before that we've kept to these two different colours, red and blue, to help explain the process better here in the video. Once you have these two props, you're ready to randomly generate the experiments for the team. Firstly, spin the blue wheel to determine the type of experiment, closely followed by the red wheel to determine the subject. Once we have an experiment to find, such as understand the process, for example, we are then looking for a volunteer from within the group to take the lead on that experiment. Maybe someone in the team has an interest in understanding a part of that process better. Now, they don't have to explain exactly what they intend to do at this point, but just ask them for a high level summary in order to encourage one or two other team members to help them form a working group in this retrospective. So repeat this process by re-spinning the wheels for each subteam with the aim of having two to four experiments created, ready to start and ready to start their experiment. Meaning, before the teams run off and start, it is worth reiterating the purpose and the outcomes expected here. So be sure to emphasize that the objective is not to create a plan for change, but to actually change something. So in order to keep the experiments focused, we suggest the results of each team should be demonstrated on the benefits into these three categories, the team. Our results will allow the greater team to work more effectively, efficiently, or enjoyably. The product, our results will increase the value of our products to our users and customers, or the organization. Our results will increase the agility of the greater organization. Remind the teams that they will be asked to demonstrate how their results will benefit the group later on. Your final task is to set the time box for the teams to return with their results. We suggest somewhere between 45 and 90 minutes here, and off they go, else. To add some variety to this retrospective topic, you can play around with either the types of experiments you wish to run or the subjects I described earlier. If you feel the blue and red wheels are too restrictive, an alternative option is to form the experiment teams first using a green spinning wheel, the template for which we've included in this file section 2. This wheel only contains an arrow, and then you would need to arrange the team around a circular table. By spinning the arrow two or three times, you can then select a working group at random, and then ask the teams to come up with some ideas to experiment on during that retrospective. Demonstration. Instead of the usual decision section, because this retrospective involves action, we've changed this part of the retrospective to demonstration. So this could be a nagging defect that's now been fixed. Hurrah! Or maybe a new automated notification procedure for when the team deployment has succeeded or failed. Few. Now, if teams are changing team values at this point or dealing with some potentially delicate issues, you may need to facilitate the team towards any changes at this point. But the emphasis here is on getting stuff done and moving forward, rather than challenging and preventing action. So in summary, this is a type of retrospective for a great way to energize the team and improve their creativity, whilst giving some time for them to actually make those changes instead of just talking about them all the time. Hopefully, this may even encourage the team to start experimenting a little bit more at other times in the project.