Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Office web squad at Fieldnote, tired of retros after three sprints on the dispatch API rewrite: Ana runs the sailboat to bring the goal back.
What the team took away
Naming the island out loud reset the mood: the squad picks the job-card review as the one anchor to cut this sprint and asks Tom to pair on the legacy sync.
How to run it
Preparation
The whole team, including anyone who joined during the sprint. New people see the boat with fresh eyes.
Write the team's current goal on the island before the session. If you cannot write it in one sentence, that is the first finding.
Draw the boat, the wind, the anchors, the rocks, the island. One sticky color per zone. Keep the drawing crude; polished boards intimidate.
Agenda
5 min
Read the island Read the goal on the island aloud. Ask: does anyone disagree that this is where we are sailing? Fix the sentence if needed.
10 min
Silent writing Each person writes stickies for wind, anchors, and rocks. Minimum one anchor and one rock each. Silence.
10 min
Wind Read the wind stickies fast. No discussion, just acknowledge. This is what to protect.
20 min
Anchors Read every anchor. Cluster. For each cluster ask: is this ours to cut, or someone else's? Mark external anchors differently.
10 min
Rocks Read the rocks. For each one: is it a rock we see or one we fear? Keep only the ones with a concrete trigger.
20 min
Actions Vote on anchors only, two dots each. Top two anchors become actions with owners. One rock gets a watch-out owner. Post the three names in the channel.
Pitfalls
Do not skip the island. A sailboat retro without a stated goal turns into a complaint session about the weather.
Do not let external anchors eat the action time. Name them, assign someone to escalate, and move on to the anchors the team controls.
Do not reuse the same drawing every sprint. After three times the metaphor is dead; switch to Start Stop Continue for a while.
Afterwards
Actions open the next retro like any other format. Anchors marked external go to the stakeholder sync or the dependency map. If the island sentence changed during the retro, tell the PM: the team's goal drifted.