In The Hobbit, September 22nd is Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, also known as Hobbit Day. In honor of Hobbit Day I created a retro for the team to inspect and adapt on how the adventure of Scrum is going Hobbit/LOTR style.

We started off with a few pictures that each convey an idea and then discussed them.

You need riddles to have a proper Hobbit/LOTR retrospective and they are great to get the team thinking, so the team guessed, or tried to guess a few 🙂

To gather feedback, I created a 4 quadrant grid on the white board and used the following images for each box with these descriptions.

 The Shire, represents everything that is good and right in the world/ your team/ job etc.

 Mordoor, represents everything that is so bad and wrong in the world/ your team/ job etc,.. that it needs to stop.

 Mirkwood/ (The Forest of Great Fear) – represents things that you are fearful of happening or things that are happening.    It is where you see entropy at work, things that suck you in and you can’t get out easily.

 Rivendell, represents the place where things are good but there are multiple threats and that good state could change if not protected. In this space put things that are working but could stop working if attention is not given to them.

As usual, we incorporated themed snacks into our retrospective. There are so many fun things to make like lembas, seed cakes, and bacon and eggs plus things you can just bring like Swedish fish, hot tea, cheese plate etc. Here is a Pinterest page I manage full of snack ideas and HERE is a website with recipes. See pics of our ‘snacks’ below!

To get a free copy of the complete step by step guide to facilitating this retro email hi@agileinitiatives.com.

Please share your pics and feedback, it is always a richer experience to see what others do with this and feel free to tweak as needed for your team of course!