Context
I'm a scrum master in a small (15 FTEs) organization that's about one year into a slow agile transformation. So far the shift towards agile has been limited to the Development team, but the other teams are also wanting to move in that direction.
Recently, the leadership (4 people) has expressed an opening to integrate the whole team in setting objectives for the quarter (we use OKRs) in order to increase visibility on goals and increase team engagement and buy-in.
The issue
We did a test, which went relatively well, but the time people had to come up with objectives was minimal, and the team had neither sufficient access to most of the important information, nor enough time to really understand that information.
The leadership is aware of the limitations of this exercise, but they also want to keep going and improve, which is encouraging.
Proposed solution
I'm thinking of planning a one-day off-site for the whole team about a month before the start of the next quarter, where we would
- Review previous OKR results and do a retrospective to learn from what we did
- Set new OKRs together
- Have other important meta conversations (e.g. values, psychological safety, etc.)
- Do some informal team building
The OKRs would then be used to fuel the roadmapping process and spur initiatives. The hope is that the team would have a shared understanding of what needs doing and feel more engaged.
Question
What approaches do you recommend to make this process engaging and fruitful?
Workshop ideas would be useful, but I especially need help on how to give the team access to the information they need to set meaningful objectives without asking them to read for a whole week. One solution that was proposed would be for each team to write an input paper on their context and share it with others one week before the retreat.