How to Remove Fear and Blame from Your Project Reviews

Fear and blame are destructive to teams and effective project reviews. Learn specific steps you can take to curb fear and blaming & improve your reviews.

Lately, I’ve been thinking and writing about project reviews and agile retrospectives. I explored why I think traditional lessons learned exercises are a waste, and several posts on how to improve retrospectives when you have them.

This post is going to focus on how to lead a project review or retrospective without pointing fingers or blaming others. We’ll look at why fear and blame are so harmful, and then specific steps you can take prior to a review and during the review to reduce or eliminate fear and blaming.

Why Project Reviews should be Free from Fear and Blame

Here is why I think this is an important topic. If people fear reprisal or blame, they are not going to be open and honest and that will undermine the effectiveness of the process.

The team will either collude together (I won’t bring up anything negative about you if you don’t bring up anything negative about me), or they will be busy grandstanding or spinning the facts to make others look bad while…