Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective Template
Identify the positive outcomes and the challenges ahead with the simple yet effective Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective Template. Apply this popular design thinking retro and improve your processes.
About the Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective Template
H&R Block created this template to better understand internal processes, what’s working, and areas for improvement. Like any other retro, the Rose, Bud Thorn Retrospective can be used at any point of your project, so you and your team can iterate, move faster, and innovate to reach your goals.
What’s the Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective Template?
The Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective is a great exercise for getting feedback, finding opportunities, and knowing for sure what’s working within your project or organization.
This technique is derived from design thinking methodologies, and the template frame is divided into three main areas: Rose (success), Thorn (challenges) and Bud (potential).
Each of these areas helps you identify all aspects of your problem, project, or topic you want to approach with the rose, bud, thorn exercise.
Benefits of the Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective Template
Retrospectives are a great tool to help teams identify what’s working and what needs improvement in any project, sprint, or overall process. The Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective Template, in particular, is very simple but effective, designed to help you easily identify the positive aspects of your project, the challenges, and future opportunities.
This approach to retros comes from design thinking methodology, which allows teams to iterate faster and identify challenges quicker. The rose, bud, thorn exercise brings agility to teams, allowing people to clearly see their projects’ positive and most challenging aspects.
How to use Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective Template
This template helps you understand how to facilitate a retrospective. Follow the steps below when running this exercise:
Select the ready-made Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective Template and add it to your board.
Identify the focus area. It can be a problem, a project, or a process.
Explain what each area of the template means.
Rose: positive outcomes and what’s working well.
Thorn: challenges and difficulties.
Bud: potential and future opportunities.
4. Set the timer and give people time to fill in each area.
5. Cluster the stickies by similar topics, identify patterns, and give names to the clusters.
6. Gather learnings and, if needed, reach out to people privately.
Pro tips:
Set time for this retro depending on the number of participants. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
Create a safe space for people to feel comfortable and transparent about their feelings and opinions. Avoid calling out on individuals, and schedule 1:1 sessions later if needed.
Share the board so people can refer back to it.
Schedule a follow-up session to check if people implemented changes and if progress was made.
What is Rose Bud Thorn in design thinking?
Rose, bud, thorn is one of the many design thinking exercises. Design Thinking methodology is based on testing assumptions and prototypes, and the rose, bud, thorn retro helps people to quickly find out what’s working and what should be reconsidered.
What is the purpose of Rose Bud Thorn?
The purpose of the rose, bud, thorn retro is to mainly assess the challenges of any given project, problem, or process. This retrospective is designed to find out not only the weaknesses but also the strengths of a project so that people can leave this retrospective feeling inspired and with insights.
Get started with this template right now.
Roadmap Planning Template
Works best for:
Roadmap, Agile
The Roadmap Planning Template in Miro is a dynamic tool designed to streamline the process of planning and tracking project milestones. This template is part of Miro's Intelligent Templates offering, which integrates AI, interactive widgets, and automation to enhance productivity. One key feature of this template is its real-time collaboration capability, allowing team members to work together seamlessly, regardless of their location. This feature ensures that everyone is on the same page, making it easier to assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress effectively.
Entity Relationship Diagram Template
Works best for:
Flowcharts, Strategic Planning, Diagrams
Sometimes the most important relationships in business are the internal ones—between the teams, entities, and actors within a system. An entity relationship diagram (ERD) is a structural diagram that will help you visualize and understand the many complex connections between different roles. When will an ERD come in handy? It’s a great tool to have for educating and onboarding new employees or members of a team, and our template makes it so easy to customize according to your unique needs.
Johari Window Model
Works best for:
Leadership, Meetings, Retrospectives
Understanding — it’s the key to trusting others better and yourself better as well. Built on that idea, a Johari Window is a framework designed to enhance team understanding by getting participants to fill in four quadrants, each of which reveals something they might not know about themselves or about others. Use this template to conduct a Johari Window exercise when you’re experiencing organizational growth, to deepen cross-functional or intra-team connections, help employees communicate better, and cultivate empathy.
Huddle Board Template
Works best for:
Meetings
The Huddle Board Template is a digital and interactive tool that fosters seamless team collaboration. Mimicking the traditional physical boards used in office environments provides a visual platform where teams can organize tasks, share updates, and track progress. One standout benefit of this template is its real-time collaboration feature. With it, team members can instantly share feedback, change tasks, or raise queries, ensuring everyone is aligned and updated, significantly reducing miscommunication and streamlining project execution.
What? So What? Now What? Template
Works best for:
Agile Workflows, Retrospectives, Brainstorming
The What? So What? Now What? Framework empowers you to uncover gaps in your understanding and learn from others’ perspectives. You can use the What? So What? Now What? Template to guide yourself or a group through a reflection exercise. Begin by thinking of a specific event or situation. During each phase, ask guiding questions to help participants reflect on their thoughts and experience. Working with your team, you can then utilize the template to record your ideas and to guide the experience.
Business Organizational Chart Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Org Charts, Operations
Establishing hierarchy in a business can empower employees—to know their roles and responsibilities, team members, potential cross-functional collaborators, and who to turn to with a specific need. That’s just what a Business Organizational Chart does. And this template makes it simple to build a BOC for your company. The first step is to determine the high-level organizational structure of your company. Then it's easy to create a visual representation of how different employees are interconnected.