The “Pleasure & Gain” retrospective including direct access
Many Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and other agile practitioners are looking for fresh retro ideas - such as the “Pleasure and Gain” retrospective. What could it be? Don’t worry, I’ll explain the retrospective format below.
Agile Retrospective Pleasure and Gain compared to other retros
The special thing about the “Pleasure and Gain” retrospective is: You don’t just collect feedback. You talk about a specific situation, a part of the last sprint or the last few weeks - and then look at it from two perspectives: From the perspective of pleasure and gain.
Agile Retrospective Pleasure and Gain
What a pleasure to win 😎
This is also the reason why you typically have two axes with two sides. When doing this retrospective on a (digital) whiteboard, it typically looks like this.
So the opposite of pleasure is pain. And the opposite of gain is loss.
In some teams (those with a lot of experience), you simply have to give them the graph above and they can start to type. In other teams (those that need some more instructions), you might ask the following questions.
Pleasure & Gain Retro 😎: How the retro works
Random Icebreaker (2-5 minutes)
Echometer provides you with a generator for random check-in questions.
Review of open actions (2-5 minutes)
Before starting with new topics, you should talk about what has become of the measures from past retrospectives to check their effectiveness. Echometer automatically lists all open action items from past retros.
Discuss retro topics
Use the following open questions to collect your most important findings. First, everyone does it themselves, covered. Echometer allows you to reveal each column of the retro board individually in order to then present and group the feedback.
- What brought you joy?
- What has tormented you or caused you pain? Was it worth the gain?
- What caused a loss – did we gain anything from it?
- What brought joy about our Daily, and what did we lose because of it?
Catch-all question (Recommended)
So that other topics also have a place:
- What else would you like to talk about in the retro?
Prioritization / Voting (5 minutes)
On the retro board in Echometer, you can easily prioritize the feedback with voting. The voting is of course anonymous.
Define actions (10-20 minutes)
You can create a linked action via the plus symbol on a feedback. Not sure which measure would be the right one? Then open a whiteboard on the topic via the plus symbol instead to brainstorm root causes and possible measures.
Checkout / Closing (5 minutes)
Echometer enables you to collect anonymous feedback from the team on how helpful the retro was. This creates the ROTI score ("Return On Time Invested"), which you can track over time.
Pleasure & Gain Retro 😎
As you might have noticed, you can add up on these questions. One other tip can be to name a specific situation:
- Looking at our new Daily format: What about it created pleasure for you? What did we loose using it?
If you like this agile retrospective “Pleasure and Gain”, you can use it without registration with our health check and retrospective tool Echometer Simply click on the button:
Conclusion - Agile Retrospective “Pleasure and Gain”
Well, it was a pleasure to give you a brief overview of how this retro might bring you gains 😉 Check out our 32 Retrospective Ideas for beginners and professionals - might also be of interest to you.
