Exploring Compassionate Communication Featuring Playmobil Pro Figures

Real life example of a retrospective session

Many times people avoid expressing what they feel because they are afraid of consequences / because of previous experiences / different fears.

One way to encourage someone to express their feelings about what bothered them is to use the Compassionate Communication Reflection exercise from below.

It is coming from the non-violent communication method, below you have the resources.

In this post, I will bring an example of a compassionate communication reflection combined with Playmobil Pro for a team retrospective.

A new template in Miroverse for you

You can find the template for the reflection in Miroverse and use it as many times as you need. The board as a talk track included a video showing you how to use it.

Please give it some love ❤️ if you like it in Miroverse:)

What was the Team Retrospective’s challenge?

One time, I was asked to design and facilitate a retrospective for a team.

The context was:

• the team was working together for a few years, a very mature level

• the coach of this team told me that in one-to-one sessions they had a pattern appeared about one person on this team who was repeatedly doing things that all the other team members were not fine with - scheduling sessions with different persons in order to get information without involving the other team members

• that person's intentions were good, like any other team members

• the tension was in the air and was hard to put it on the table in a way that it’s addressed and things are changing

How did I design the session?

When I thought through how I could hold this retrospective I had one big concern and I formulated like this: how might I support this team to have compassionate communication without the person feeling guilty and ashamed in front of the others for the consequences of his behavior?

And I thought to start the session with an appreciation exercise like this:

• I invited all members of the team to think in silence in the last weeks (they were working in sprints of 3-week cycles) and note down what they learned and got help with from each other member of the team

• For the next step, I invited them to build a Playmobil Pro model for each team member showing the things they learned and got help with - this meant each person would build 5 other models

What happened after this starting point?

• There was an amazing thing happening: absolutely all team members expressed their gratitude for that person's help during the last weeks, and he was touched by their appreciation in a very nice way - so the opposite of my concern happened, which was fabulous!

• A psychologically safe environment was created in a very short time, a strong sense of belonging, trust, and gratitude

One example from the Playmobil Pro models is this team under one umbrella which symbolizes the way that person felt lately, protected by the team members:

What happened next?

• I invited each team member to use the Compassionate Communication Reflection template and write down as many situations (not addressing a specific person but a situation) and their requests to the team in general - in this way, I wanted to avoid the pointing out to one person only

• Then I invite them to imagine that situation with Playmobil Pro figures and write down out of all the filled templates 3 that are most important for them to share in that round

• The next step was that everybody shared his Playmobil Pro situation model together with the filled template situation with the team

• For every situation, they were putting questions in case they were not sure that they got the idea

And what was the next step?

• They wrote for themselves what they would do differently in the next sprint ( development cycle) - they did this in silence

• They shared their notes with the team and wrote down action points for them

Bottom lines:

It was not a typical retrospective, but was helping this team to solve precisely the “elephant” in the room in a very compassionate way. Feel free to combine different methods to help your team solve sensitive problems, and challenges.

Resources:

• "Nonviolent Communication" book by M. Rosenberg

• "Giraffe Juice Workbook: A Nonviolent Communication Games" book by Follow Your Joy Press

• Non-Violent Request Guide - "High Impact Tools For Teams" - Strategyzer, Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Alexander Osterwalder