Retrospective Activity

Santa Claus is coming!

Playful Seasonal Medium Popularity: 1

This activity:

Easy metaphor to follow
Requires some training
Focus on future planning

Introduction

This is a festive futurespective activity, themed for Christmas and new Year. Introduce the activity by saying that participants are kids expecting their gifts from the Santa. Under this theme ask each member to share what they expect Santa to bring in the new year, who would help into making this gift a reality, and what are the blockers standing in the way.

Gifts from Santa 🎅

🦌 Reindeer & Elfs 🧝

Trolls 🧌

For the specific activity, the facilitator could use these points to describe the process:

The Gifts from Santa 🎅 column is for achievements, milestones, wins that the team wishes to accomplishes in the new year.
The 🦌 Reindeer & Elfs 🧝 column is for actions and people that help the team into getting better and achieving the goals in question.
The Trolls 🧌 column is for actions, behaviours, and situations that are blocking the team into achieving future goals..

TIP

Onboarding the team to the selected activity is important for a successful meeting. To learn more on what's needed to onboard your team to a retrospective meeting, read here.

Tips & Tricks

Use this activity to capture team desires and troubling thoughts for the year ahead.

Try to add some role-playing in the notes added by making analogies with Christmas fables, e.g. 'Rudolf: Scrum master is our guiding light!

Popularity: 1

The "Santa Claus is coming!" activity is rarely used among Team O'clock teams. It seems that only a few teams use this activity for their retrospectives.

Recap