Identify themes
Description and objectives
After the Locate Strengths interviews, the interviewer pairs group together to share what they have learned. As the team listens to the different stories, recurring themes and compelling ideas emerge that can become experiments, changes, or recommendations for the next sprint.
How to run the activity
- After the interviews, groups of four to six people are formed by bringing together two or three interview pairs.
- Cards are handed out to each group.
- Each interviewer reports to their group on what they learned in their interview. The group discusses which themes have come up in more than one interview and writes the most compelling ones on the cards.
- Each group places its cards on a wall or spreads them out on the floor.
- Once all the groups have finished, the whole team sorts the cards into thematic clusters.
- Each group is asked to choose a set of cards it wants to work on, in order to define the steps needed to develop the most significant themes.
- The groups report on their work, which becomes a candidate for action planning in the next phase of the retrospective.
Relationship with Locate strengths
Identify themes is the companion activity to Locate strengths: while Locate strengths gathers individual information through interviews, Identify themes processes it collectively to extract shared learning. The two techniques were designed to be used together and form a complete gathering → synthesis sequence.
Common mistake
Not allowing enough time for the collective sorting. The phase in which all the groups place their cards together and the whole team clusters them is where the most valuable learning emerges: themes that appear across several independent groups are clear signals of systemic patterns. If time runs out before reaching that phase, the team will have had conversations in small groups but will not have built a shared vision.
Resources
🔧 Diseñar una retrospectiva [Designing a retrospective, in Spanish]Template · Scrum Manager
References
- Derby, Esther; Larsen, Diana. (2006). Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Pragmatic Bookshelf.
See also
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