Sail Boat Retrospective Tool
Many years ago I picked up on the idea of using a sail boat diagram while attending an Agile Delaware meeting. I thought it was interesting and have been using it in various versions over the years. It is a great way to get the team brainstorming in their thinking and it gives them starting points for the thought process.
In watching Jeff Sutherland on YouTube at the TEDxAix talking about The art of doing twice as much in half the time, he mentioned the idea that it is not just about increasing velocity but Acceleration. In circular motion Acceleration is velocity squared over radius. So I envisioned Acceleration V^2 for the upper right quadrant. We as scrums masters need to help teams accelerate to the next level of new product development.
Some sites have reference they learned this technique from Innovation Games so I also wanted to send some credit for sharing with other in Scrum.
In the images below I just drew a really bad sail boat in Microsoft PowerPoint which I was sharing via webex with our teammates overseas.
The nice thing about using the sail boat: it is really simple. It helps to get the team thinking about what went well in the Sprint (full sail), what did not go so well for the team (slowed the team), potential risks for the team to look think about as they go (the rocks) and they think about ideas that could help them move faster in the future. This last quadrant is where we as Scrum Masters speed to spend team in. If we can accelerate the team this is a good place to look for ideas.
