The Endless Cycle of Blame
Retrospectives, You’re Doing Them Wrong!
The retrospective
The retrospective is a fixed meeting format where the team takes the time to reflect. Everyone gets a chance to drop her/his thoughts on the last sprint/week/iteration. The good, the bad and whatever suits the situation. From time to time a short discussion might ensue from something being dropped via a post-it or a simple note or however the retrospective is being facilitated.
Then there is a short reflection phase followed by deciding which improvements the team wants to focus on for the upcoming sprint/iteration. These improvements are usually written down and added to the wall or sprint board — visible for the team to see.
Everyone has agreed on solving a certain number of problems. Everyone has seen the reminders on the wall, maybe someone is even in charge of reminding everyone — to keep an eye on these improvements.
And then…
Nothing happens.
Same scenario at the next retrospective and then the next one and the next. You get the idea.
Things don’t work? Apply the same solution over and over again. Welcome to the endless blame game. You might have experienced it first hand, read or heard about it or observed it as a bystander.
Retrospectives, You’re doing them wrong!
Instead of defining multiple improvements and losing focus on all of them, just choose one. Focus on a single improvement and see what happens when you tackle the problem from one perspective. Not working? Change the perspective. Experiment and iterate over the implementation. This is so simple and effective — we tend to neglect it.
Just think in terms of habits — you will need some time to create a habit and the most effective approach is to create one habit at a time — not focus on ten things at once. Mastering one task is hard enough. Same thing goes with improvements and team dynamics.
Find out what’s really causing the problem. Is there something you’re currently overlooking or is there something else that is causing those problems? Get somebody to help facilitate — sometimes problems are obvious to non team members.
Applying the same solution over and over again implies someone believes to know the solution to the problem or that nobody is really interested in improving per se. Rather think in terms of an MVP. Don’t give up on experimenting in iterations. This is not rocket science.
Ask questions. Keep asking. Keep iterating. Focus on a single improvement. Get this right and repeat.
