Three Little Pigs Retrospective online
Did you just search Google for “Three Little Pigs Retrospective online”? - Great, then you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, I’m going to give you an overview of the Three Little Pigs retrospective and show you how you can easily hold it online.
Three Little Pigs Retrospective Online
The 3 questions to ask at the Three Little Pigs Retrospective:
First things first: The Three Little Pigs Retrospective is derived from the fable of the same name. In it, three little pigs each build their own shelter to protect themselves from the big bad wolf. One shelter was built from straw, the next from sticks, and the last from stones. As you can imagine, the three shelters are each differently robust. And it is precisely this symbol of stability that the retro is intended to transfer to the team’s activities.
Three Little Pigs Retrospective Online
Three Little Pigs questions, examples and online template
Retrospective Idea Three Little Pigs: 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.
- House of straw: What are we doing that is just barely holding together, but could collapse at any moment? 🌱
- House of sticks: What are we doing that is relatively stable, but can be improved? 🪵
- House of stone: What are we doing that is rock solid? 🪨
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.
Retrospective Idea Three Little Pigs
As seen in the chart, there are the following three questions of the “Three Little Pigs Retro”:
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What do we do that is just holding together, but could collapse at any moment? (House of straw):
- Example: You have the feeling that not everyone in your team dares to speak up. This can lead to malaise in the team in the foreseeable future. So the so-called “psychological safety” should be improved. So you could start doing an agile team health check in 3 steps in the team. (More info about: “Psychological safety%E2%80%9C or “Team Health Check in 3 steps”)
- What do we do that is relatively stable but can be improved? (House made of sticks):
- Example: It’s good to look at agile metrics like your team’s velocity from time to time – that’s been going well lately, but feel free to do it more often! (Read more: “agile metrics”)
- What do we do that is rock solid? (House of stone):
- Example: You were very happy with the new tool to help with prioritization & transparency of the product backlog. It should definitely be used further.
Three Little Pigs Retrospective Online
It doesn’t always have to be factual….
There are an incredible number of retrospectives that are very factual in their approach. The Start Stop Continue Retrospective is one example. But I always get feedback from my team that new retrospective approaches really get the brain pumping. In short, classic retrospectives are great, but in my experience, you leave a lot of potential by the wayside if you don’t approach your team’s subconscious thoughts from every possible perspective. And that’s where retrospectives that package classic questions in a slightly more unconventional way have proven to be very practical.
In the case of the Three Little Pigs Retrospective, you look at your activities from a completely new perspective. You don’t just categorize what has happened into drawers like “Drop Add Keep Improve” as with the DAKI Retrospective, but you also look at the substance much more closely.
You could also present the Three Little Pigs in a much more factual way, such as: “Doesn’t work well yet; works quite well; works as it should;” - But I personally feel that you look at the activities much more superficially than when you build the symbol of the “house of straw.” You really feel that this house fulfills a necessary purpose, but will collapse at the next gust of wind. And it is precisely this feeling that is suddenly reflected in the activities in the team. Because if I have learned one thing over the years, it is that our feelings and intuition often perceive twice as much as our logical memory, which is more likely to be covered by classic retrospectives.
Conclusion - The Three Little Pigs Retrospective
I could write for hours about how retrospectives like the Three Little Pigs retrospective allow you to look deeper into the team’s thought processes, but I think it’s enough to know that retrospectives like this are a good admixture to the classics to bring a little more looseness, but also thought depth to the retros.
