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! ⬇️)

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! 

[Manish Bannur]

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!

[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.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

@Kristen Roth Thank you for sharing that idea again! 

Today we did a new version of that ? :) 

[Kristen Roth]

How fun! I love the idea of introducing a ritual that reduces stress... and promotes team bonding! Thanks for sharing, @Gonchik Tsymzhitov

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

@Kristen Roth You're welcome! 

[John Funk]

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

[Kristen Roth]

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

[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

[Kristen Roth]

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

[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?

[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.

[Dave]

Great - thanks @Kristen Roth !

[Jayesh Baviskar]

Something really interesting. Thanks for sharing

[Kristen Roth]

Thanks for reading, @Jayesh Baviskar !

[KAGITHALA BABU ANVESH]

Thanks for sharing. will explore this

[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. 

[Laura Holton _ACE Rotterdam_]

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

[Kristen Roth]

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

[Fadoua]

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

[Kristen Roth]

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

[G subramanyam]

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

[Kristen Roth]

Excellent, @G subramanyam !

[Stanislav]

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]

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 

[Kristen Roth]

That'll definitely be a great time to reevaluate! 

[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.

[Kristen Roth]

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

[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]

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 ;)

[Srinatha T]

ha ha true.