Using the Cartoon Story Board Technique in Retrospectives

Cartoon Story Board (also called Comic Story Board) is one of my favourite creativity techniques and it can be used to good effect in retrospectives. I have used it in the “setting the stage” phase of retrospectives to help a team to frame the key question to be tackled during the retrospective, and for helping to generate ideas when deciding what to do differently in the future.

It is useful in the following contexts:

Teams in conflict, retrospectives, futurespectives, problem reframing during the “problem definition” phase of Buffalo style Creative Problem Solving (CPS).

The procedure that I use is:

  1. The facilitator draws the grid and lays out the paper on a table at which the participants are sitting.
  2. The participants draw a representation of the current situation in the first cell.
  3. The participants draw a representation of an ideal state in the last cell.
  4. The participants imagine that they are looking back from a future time represented by cell 6 and draw a representation of the first step that was taken to make things better in cell 2.
  5. The participants draw a representation of how it was just before they reached the cell 6 time in cell 5.
  6. The participants fill in cells 3 and 4.

From here it is usually a short step to problem/question reframing (ask the participants “what is the key problem that we have identified here?”). Alternatively or in addition, the technique can be followed by braining storming, clustering and dot voting to generate ideas for action.

On Key

Related Posts

man in gray sweater standing in front of his colleagues

The Three Pillars of Scrum

Scrum “by the book” is very simple and it’s a great place to start, but teams that want to get outstanding results understand the journey has only just begun. The three pillars model can help your team on this journey by allowing you to maximise the effectiveness of each part of Scrum.

The three pillars of Scrum are transparency, inspection and adaptation. They can be used to “inspect and adapt” your Scrum implementation and set you and your team on the path to really excellent Scrum.

measuring guitar pick

Can Agile be Measured?

Measuring Agile Transformations Organisations run their agile transformations with teams staffed with trainers and coaches. They often track the progress of their work through the

Scaling Agile Meetup

We’ve moved our Scaling Agile Lean Coffee to the meetup.com platform. You can join the group here:

https://www.meetup.com/scaling-agile-meetup/

The upcoming events will be published in the group. At the time of writing, the next event is 12th May at 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST. There is always a lively discussion so why not bring your burning topic on agile transformation or scaling agile to the group? It’s free to join.

Register your interest in ELCAS-approved training with ScrumCenter