Learn how to facilitate the Sailboat sticky note technique.
Take Retrium's Technique Quiz to figure out which retrospective technique best fits the needs of your next retrospective.
A Sailboat retrospective is a helpful tool that can illuminate all of the things that are helping and hindering your team and develop clear improvement activities in a fun way. Sailboat is excellent from when you want to:
- Define end goals.
- Identify risks that may disrupt your path.
- Identify what is slowing your team down on its journey to the end goal.
- Identify what helps the team achieve its goals faster.
As you start your retrospective, the facilitator should explain what each column represents.
- ποΈThe Island represents the teams' goals.
- πͺ¨ The Rocks represent the potential risks the team may encounter while working towards their goals.
- β The Anchor represents things that are slowing the team down.
- π¨ The Wind represents things that may help propel the team towards your goal.
Facilitating the Process
The process of running this type of retrospective in Retrium works like this:
- Everyone brainstorms ideas to add to sticky notes under the "island," "rocks," "anchor," and "wind" columns in the "think" phase
- The team then organizes sticky notes they with to discuss together during the "group" stage
- Everyone privately votes on which notes or groups they think are important to discuss during the "vote" phase
- Retrium organizes the most important topics in order of votes during the "discuss" step, where your team can choose to discuss one or more items and turn the next steps into specific action items
- The team can then reflect on the effectiveness of the retrospective as a whole during the "close" phase, and your team can choose to review those results before concluding the meeting