Running continuously sprint retrospectives while keeping the Scrum team awareness during this activity is one of the biggest challenge for ScrumMasters. In this article, Marc Nazarian present an game called “Turn the tables” that should help the ScrumMaster to achieve this objective.
This game is a simple exercise where team members write on red and green cards two things that went well during the sprint and two things that could be improved in just one or two words. The interesting part of the game is that these cards are then passed to their table neighbours. The member receiving the card has to present it and this force him to put himself in the shoes of his teammate. Optionally after this presentation, you can ask the member originally writing the card if the presentation match his thoughts when he wrote the card.
Red (improvement) cards continue to be passed to next people and the conversation can start on how to improve things. This game brings some fun to the retrospective and help improving the communication and cohesion in the Scrum Team.
Read the full article on http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/496-iteration-retrospective-activity-turn-the-tables