nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Play of the month: Reclaim your precious time with a Ritual Reset

Kristen Roth

Chances are, we can probably all agree that team rituals are important. These regularly occurring activities in service of our teams and organizations can have tremendous impact on our work.

But when’s the last time you took some time to examine your team’s rituals? Been a while? Or maybe it’s something you haven’t had a chance to do… ever? No worries. Our new Play, Ritual Reset, will guide you through the process and help you decide which rituals to keep, improve, and maybe even remove.

To give you a sneak peek, you’ll run through:

For the keepers: how do we ensure they continue to be effective?
For those to improve: what's one thing we can try to make them better?
For those to remove: who will remove them from everyone’s calendars?

(An example of the Play in action using a Trello board! ⬇️)

ritual reset.jpeg

Feeling ready to try out the new Play with your team? We’d love to talk with you about how it goes, and hear any thoughts you might have about your team’s rituals and ways of working. Let us know below!

Comments

Manish Bannur_2twoau

I will try this today with my team

Kristen Roth

Awesome, @Manish Bannur . We'd love to hear how it goes!

Gonchik Tsymzhitov

@Kristen Roth Thanks! Interesting I will propose that one to the team

Kristen Roth

Great! Let us know what comes out of the exercise, @Gonchik Tsymzhitov!

John Funk

What a good reminder to review rituals. It is easy for them to become stale and common place.

Gonchik Tsymzhitov

We detected for one team the next ritual,

they played early before retro meeting in the office playstation, to be relaxed.

Now we trying to cover via online game, let's see how it will help.

That ritual based on the skipping stress before retro and demo meeting, because some team members are feeling some stress.

Vero Rivas

Hi @Kristen Roth

The truth is that I had not read this until today and I think it just gave me ideas to consider with my team.

Thank you very much for sharing

Cheers

Dave

This is an interesting play, do you think this would work when taking on a new team or would this be something you only do with teams that you've been in for a while?

Jayesh Baviskar

Something really interesting. Thanks for sharing

KAGITHALA BABU ANVESH_z1zl10

Thanks for sharing. will explore this

Gonchik Tsymzhitov

@Kristen Roth Thank you for sharing that idea again!

Today we did a new version of that ?

Kristen Roth

It sure is, @John Funk. Let us know if you give this Play a go!

Kristen Roth

That's great, @Vero Rivas! Let us know what you uncover!

Kristen Roth

It can absolutely be used when taking on a new team! Chances are, the team you're joining has their own set of rituals that need reviewing. This would give you a chance to learn what they are, and, be a fresh pair of eyes for them as they determine what changes might be needed.

Kristen Roth

Thanks for reading, @Jayesh Baviskar !

Kristen Roth

Let us know how it goes, @KAGITHALA BABU ANVESH !

Brant Schroeder

Interesting, I am almost scared to use it and see what ends up being identified.

Kristen Roth

All the more reason to jump right in, @Brant Schroeder! 😉

Our team had many 💡 moments when we ran the Play and we all felt it was such a worthwhile exercise.

Dave

Great - thanks @Kristen Roth !

Laura Holton _ACE Manchester_

This is really interesting, I'll definitely have to give it a go and see what it uncovers 😃 Thanks for sharing @Kristen Roth

Tinker Fadoua - [Seibert US]

Hard to make changes to the team rituals when you are a member to the team not the decision maker not even the Scrummaster.

G subramanyam

Thank you @Kristen Roth I will explore this Team playbook and post my observation/ experience.

Kristen Roth

Great, @Laura Holton _ACE Manchester_ ! We'd love to hear how it goes!

Kristen Roth

Excellent, @G subramanyam !

Kristen Roth

@Tinker Fadoua do you think running this Play could help get conversations about changes started?

Stanislav_cjfmi4

Nice !

Guilhem Dupuy

Great post !

Phill Fox

Great reminder that Agile rituals should never be considered sacrosanct and should be up for review alongside everything else.

sudarshan

Interesting.!

john aiton

this is interesint

Leonie C. Breitmoser

That's an interesting idea.

I think I'll twist it a bit to use it in a new team to identify and build new rituals. Then, in a few month, as intended - reviewing all rituals.

Kristen Roth

Nice idea, @Leonie C_ Breitmoser !

Jack Brickey

Interesting read. I have a new project coming up that will be a cross functional team and I may try to incorporate this play.

M Amine

Interesting, nice !

Jay_izxrm9

I feel post WFH for Covid there will be a lot of businesses needing to reset their rituals. We had to recently purge a number as they were good for touching base while remote but with us in the office they seemed to be counter productive

Bill Sheboy

The teams I support regularly do this during retrospectives, with a "deep cleaning" during our annual retro. We often use a tool like Trello to show a skeleton of our workflow and rituals, and brainstorm/discuss with 1-2-4-All on the areas, and define our next improvement experiments to see what we can learn next.

DPKJ

This look very similar to our sprint retro!

Marshall Walker Lee

It would be interesting to run a mini-version of this play once a month and see how the processes evolve.

Kristen Roth

That'll definitely be a great time to reevaluate!

Kristen Roth

Sounds like you've got a great process going, @Bill Sheboy !

Kristen Roth

For sure, @Marshall Walker Lee . Processes and rituals can be "broken" (and for quite a while!) without us even realizing they have problems. Carving out regular time to really take a close look at them will help us make sure we're using the time we have set aside for these in the most effective way.

Reply Test Group

Every now and then, some reset is vital

Kishan Sharma

This is good one, gave us few reasons to use Trello

Caroline R

Thanks for sharing this! The Trello template is great!

nina_schmidt

Thanks for the reminder @Kristen Roth

Liam Green

+1 for this - I think it is an excellent idea.

It would also be a useful way of logging rituals for new colleagues to see too

Suvradip Paul

We have done this similar exercise during our retrospectives. I love the insights drawn and it helps in long run. Thanks @Kristen Roth for sharing!

Cheers

Suvradip

Kristen Roth

It definitely would, @Liam Green !

Kristen Roth

That's great to hear, @Suvradip Paul !

Brittany Wispell

Hey!

Our team is dispersed globally and upwards of 20+ people. We are split under different managers but are still considered 1 team. Do you have any suggestions for a similar play book that could work for a team of 20+? Or could this work by splitting the teams by who the manager?

Would this be worth seeing each (for this case we'll call ourselves 'Squads') Squads rituals and trying to standardize across?

I really like this play book, taking stock of what is happening now so we can look at where we might be able to save some time and eliminate unnecessary rituals & scoping out long term or quarterly rituals.

Thanks for sharing!

Kristen Roth

Hey, @Brittany Wispell! Sorry for my delayed response here! Would you say that you work most closely with your smaller "squad"? I'm in a similar boat, and on a team of ~20, which is then broken out into smaller teams, each under separate managers. For us, it absolutely made sense to run this Play with our smaller team, as we share all of the same Team Rituals, whereas we only share some of them with the larger, 20-person team. After running the Play with your immediate Squad, it would be great to share what you learned with your larger team and see if they'd be interested in doing the same with their smaller groups. And when all Squads have completed the Play, it would be interesting to see if there are common themes!

Srinatha Tondihal

ha ha true.

Welcome!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

Quick Links

Find more posts tagged with

team-playbook

play-of-the-month