Why Sticky Notes Are Your Visualization Superpower in Retrospectives | Alex Sloley

Alex Sloley: Why Sticky Notes Are Your Visualization Superpower in Retrospectives

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"Like the smell, the vibe is something you feel. If you're having a successful impact on the organization or on teams as a Scrum Master, you can feel it, you can smell it. It's intangible." - Alex Sloley

Alex introduces a compelling concept from Sumantra Ghoshal about "the smell of the workplace"—you can walk into an environment and immediately sense whether it smells like fresh strawberries and cream or a dumpster fire. In Australia, there's a cultural reference from the movie "The Castle" about "the vibe of the thing," and Alex emphasizes that as a successful Scrum Master, you can feel and smell when you're having an impact. While telling executives you're measuring "vibe" might be challenging, Alex shares three concrete ways he's measured success. The key insight is that success isn't always measurable in traditional ways, but successful Scrum Masters develop an intuition for sensing when their work is making a meaningful difference.

Self-reflection Question: Can you articulate the "vibe" or "smell" of your current team or organization? What specific indicators tell you whether your Scrum Master work is truly making an impact beyond the metrics?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Sticky Notes for Everything

Alex champions any retrospective format that includes sticky notes, calling them a "visualization superpower." With sticky notes, teams can visualize anything—the good, the bad, improvements, options, possibilities, and even metrics. They make information transparent, which is critical for the inspect-and-adapt cycle that forms the heart of Scrum. Alex emphasizes being strategic about visualization: identify a challenge, figure out how to make it visual, and then create experiments around that visualization. Once something becomes visible, magic happens because the team can see patterns they've never noticed before. You can use different sizes, colors, and positions to visualize constraints in the system, including interruptions, unplanned work, blocker clustering, impediments, and flow. This approach works not just in retrospectives but in planning, reviews, and daily scrums. The key principle is that you must have transparency in order to inspect, and you must inspect to adapt. Alex's practical advice: be strategic about what you choose to visualize, involve the team in determining how to make challenges visible, and watch as the transparency naturally leads to insights and improvement ideas.

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About Alex Sloley

Alex believes that a great Scrum Master can have a long and lasting impact on people and teams. He is a global agile and product management evangelist, author of The Agile Community, and frequent international speaker. A former Microsoft leader with 15 years' experience, he now trains, coaches, and drives transformations worldwide. Certified across Scrum, ICAgile, and Kanban, Alex energizes communities, guides leaders, and—yes—enjoys good beer.

You can link with Alex Sloley on LinkedIn.