Here is a description of a fun, morning themed retrospective.

Morning routine – Set the stage

Get to know each other and bond as a team
Play or mimic your personal alarm sound and briefly describe your morning routine. Ask everyone to do the same in a quick round robin. This will help people to share some “save to share” personal things and the team to connect on a more personal level.

Getting out of bed – Gather data

Collect demotivating and motivating aspects of work
To help the team connect with this exercise, tell a story of a time when you had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning because you were dreading going to work. What was the reason? How did that make you feel? Give everyone 5 minutes to reflect on reasons that make it harder for them to get out of bed in the morning. Let them note down the reasons. After 5 minutes ask when they actually were excited to get up in the morning because they were looking forward to going to work. What was the reason? Give them another 5 minutes, then collect afterward.

Cluster and dot vote – Generate insights

Pick the most important topics
Look for patterns and cluster the collected topics. Then vote which ones are most important to talk about in more depth.

SMART actions – Decide what to do

Formulate a specific and measurable plan of action
Create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-boxed action plans.

Bed time routine – Close the retrospective

Get to know each other and bond as a team
Briefly, describe how you know when it’s time to go to bed. What are the indicators / triggers? What is your bed time routine? Ask everyone to do the same in a quick round robin. This will help people to share some “save to share” personal things and the team to connect on a more personal level. At this point, I feel like it’s my duty to remind everyone that they decide how much they would like to share 🙂

For more inspiration on what to do in your next retrospective and to mix and match this with other activities, check out the awesome Retromat.