The Biggest Anti-Pattern Of Them All - Retros With No People Practice

When I write these newsletters I can’t help but wonder about the overlap between my two “readerships”. This is chiefly because of my fetish for efficiency which gives me a genuine loathing of repeating myself and wasting your time. “Ain’t nobody got time for that”. As such, for context today, if you haven’t, please go read this and this - two articles announcing our new “Set Team Action” feature. 

For full disclosure and to illustrate how different I think the audiences are, I’ll admit I wondered if I shouldn’t warn you all to take the term “feature” with a grain of salt- as you are mostly product minds reading this- because it is really "just" a free text box in our Dashboard but you know what? That’s product owner imposter syndrome at work right there -after all, this thing that our product does was born from evolution and feedback, we spent time making it as great as we can and we’re testing it as A/B-ish as possible and betters what the solution used to do for our clients in its absence while serving a major purpose so hell yes, it is a “feature”. 

So here’s why I mention it - as part of our research and mapping, we spent time working out how and -more importantly- if we should harmonise it to formal ceremonies, in particular Retros. How often should teams set new goals (we think the Action needs to be worked on during the sprint so as often as you have sprints but not shorter than a few weeks)? Does it need to integrate any views from the project management views so it’s used as the main space to conduct a retro? Does it need to perhaps be a plug-in to some commonly used tool? Does it have to pull or push any data in any other workspace that looks at how the team felt such as Atlassian’s Team Health Monitor? Etc. 

We left some ideas on the Backlog, but we had to shelf the rest because, much as it pains me to admit it, not every team we work with is Agile and I don’t mean “in their heart of hearts” but even on paper and in practices, and we need to make a solution that helps and betters every team even if they have never heard of a retro in their lives. 

Still, self-gratifyingly, it allowed me to go back to my Agile anthropologist corner and spend a lot of time thinking of the meaning of life retrospectives wise. Over the years I’ve written about my fascination with the idea and most of all, the amount of resistance I’ve noticed to it across the board in most teams. 

I often postulated this resistance is there because people who fall in love with Agile are doers addicted to GSD and speed, so anything to slow them down is naturally difficult and unwelcomed. And irrespective of when or how we conduct a retro, what game or gimmick we inject, whatever we use to drive it, it is unquestionably a contemplative and -most of the time- uneasy and unsettling exercise if we are to do it as the Gods of Agile intended it and bare our souls. 

In our defence as an industry, we try to insist collectively on their importance and we all, irrespective of the methodology or philosophy allegiance agree that we can’t and shouldn’t get away from them, but I think that we need a Retro Come-To-Jesus moment to do better and avoid all the anti-patterns we keep denouncing. 

Companies in the business of making our Agile lives easier (feel free to set that up as a category in any tech awards, let us know when you do so we enter PeopleNotTech!) have long attempted to demystify the issues behind retros and we often see the likes of Retrium, Target Process and of course Atlassian sending us all kinds of stuff that’s meant to help us with Retros from articles that make sense about introverts to ways of avoiding unstructured, blameful, bored, and complaining retros. Interspersed between them, the odd article on how to keep breathing through homeschooling and whether you should get a Peleton and reminders about “Lean Coffee’s virtual hand-outs” and studies about the relationship between grey matter in the pre-frontal cortex and how our developers may engage when asked for feedback. A very mixed bag indeed. 

It’s all looking so messy because retros are messy. Of course they are. They are about humans and emotions, not code or tickets. They aren’t a press conference about what has transpired in the sprint and meaningless stats. They aren’t a time to do a buy-in demo to each other. They aren’t a time to seethe and thrall LinkedIn Jobs for alternatives that would save you the pain in the future while nodding on Zoom calls. Not an OKR space. They aren’t meant to be a clean PR-like exercise. Or a time when some middle manager disperses tasks or assigns blame and menaces. Or -my main pet-peeve- the only time to do any customer feedback work in the remaining 17 minutes.  

What they are, is a People Practice team space combined with some objective data of what happened. The reason why they are hard to figure out, accept, structure and keep to, is because teams lack this notion of People Practice entirely. This is lack stems from my obsession - “the human debt” - aka” all the bad stuff we have previously done to our humans at work” (tm). 

What this means is that the above mentioned mixed bag is all, in fact, necessary as there is SO much left undone when it comes to not-ignoring and not-disrespecting our humans if we want high performing teams and digital elite level outcomes. Personal wellbeing, team dynamics and health and how it all reflects in the only lever of productivity - Psychological Safety - is all in need of being thought of and talked about. Ad nausea. And yes, part of this talking and thinking needs to happen in the retro. 

What’s more, is that there’s no shortcut to the work a team needs to do on their people practice and on the need for EQ of their team leader other than putting in the work regularly -ideally with the right tools as ours but in their absence “manually”- and that minimising and trivialising the effort needed by allowing the impression that the bit about people is an afterthought (there’s a 3 seconds vote countdown on the already scarce indicators one is questioned about in the major tool used by many of us for a telling example). This is not a 3 seconds job. Or an 8 general questions topic. 

The “woke” Team Leads we work with that have a high EQ and a seasoned People Practice have told us that they too bemoan the times when they didn’t need to be armed with empathy and connection and reinforce vision at every retro, the days when they could ignore that they need to make their people their main preoccupation, but that these days, because they want to win, they are splitting the time (and the screen at times) between the WHAT and they WHY. 

Jira, Trello and OKR spaces only tell you the former, for the latter, you have to either “manually” or by using a team tool like ours, base everything on Psychological Safety and ASK loads, OBSERVE behaviour, UNDERSTAND individual feelings and team dynamics and then discuss everything with everyone and hear everyone out then settle on a brief WHAT NEXT of the People Practice - set a Team Goal/Aim/Pledge/Intention or (better yet) Action to do on the next sprint. 

Obviously, building a People Practice doesn’t happen for or in the retros only. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in between for everyone -no one is exempt from constantly exercising their EQ, empathy and speaking up muscles in a team- the bulk of the work falls with the team lead (Coach, Business Owner (?!?), Product Owner, Scrum Master, Lead, Servant, Blocker-remover, even Project Manager or whatever/whoever else they are to you) whose job has become “about humans” they moment they understood their team’s happiness is the only realistic lever they have to see high performance in their work. 

So if you see your teams -and yourself- dread or shy away from retros, deal with all the obvious issues but most of all, change the narrative from “It’s A thing we do” to “It’s THE thing we do. The time when we can look back and uncomfortability be damned, open-heartedly work out what we felt like and then what actions we can set as a team to feel different/better/the same.”

Stay Psychologically Safe to stay productive and sane! 

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

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