The group therapy session: retrospective anti-patterns
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective.” Sound familiar? This is one of the 12 principles from the Agile manifesto, and for most teams, this principle manifests as a regular retrospective meeting of some kind.
Except… I lied to you.
The principle actually states: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.” But, for many teams – especially when they’re new to running retrospectives – they tend to forget about that second part.
Where teams go wrong
Your team sits down for their regular retrospective session, and engagement is ridiculously high. Everyone shows up with plenty to talk about. Your teammates celebrate their wins, appreciate one another, vent about things that didn’t go according to plan, and they may even propose a few ways they could do things better in the future.
And then the meeting ends, everyone goes back to work, and nothing really changes. There may be a few half-hearted attempts to implement some of the ideas that were discussed, and occasionally someone on your team captures an action item by accident. But by and large, team members walk away from each retrospective with maybe a bit of closure but mostly the feeling that they just wasted another hour on yet another pointless meeting.
How to fix it
It may sound counter-intuitive, but retrospectives are not fundamentally about the past — they’re about the future. During retrospectives we discuss what happened in the past as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Talking about the past ensures shared understanding of the problems we want to solve, and it provides context for the solutions we want to try.
If your team struggles to get actionable outcomes from retrospectives, here are some things you can work on with them:
Dedicate space on the whiteboard to record action items, and nominate a facilitator to own that space and make sure it gets filled in. This makes the goal of the meeting highly visible to all participants, and it formalises accountability for making sure the discussion progresses towards that goal. The facilitator is also empowered to participate in discussions, so long as they prioritise their duty to record the outcomes of those discussions.
Once your team members have started discussing a topic and everyone has a good understanding of where things are at, start guiding the discussion towards designing a plan of action. There will be some topics that your team members will have very strong feelings about that they want to express, and that’s great! By all means, let people spend a few minutes getting things off their chests… and then they need to start channelling that energy towards a productive outcome. If a discussion starts going in circles or seems to be devolving into a venting session, start prompting the participants to suggest ways the team can improve the situation.
Carpark topics that aren’t yielding constructive discussion. There are some topics that are not appropriate for retrospectives. These may be problems that your team members aren’t ready to discuss potential solutions for yet, or that only affect a small minority of your team, or that originate from outside the team. If the facilitator is struggling to direct a conversation towards devising a plan of action, ask to carpark the issue and move on. Also, be sure to flag these items for later follow-up, as you may want to incorporate them into one-to-ones with your team members, discuss them with other team leads, etc.
Treat process improvement tasks just like regular work tasks — track them on the board, bring them up during standups, reserve bandwidth for them during sprints, etc. That may be a contentious recommendation, but in my experience it’s the only way to reliably ensure that teams actually trial new ways of working. I’ve seen way too many teams put in all of that work to run productive retrospectives and capture action items… and then toss those action items into a process improvement backlog, where they are never seen again. Keep these tasks highly visible, and keep your team accountable for following through!
Your team should now be getting regular actionable outcomes from its retrospectives, which will also boost engagement and improve cohesion within your team. This is a great start, and there are many ways you can gain more value from this practice. I’ll be revisiting this topic from time to time — keep an eye out.