There is a 3-Headed Monster craving to infiltrate your Agile Retrospectives. It’s 3 heads are Deflection, Defensiveness, and Dismissal. Let’s look at where and how this monster can creep into and derail your Agile Retrospectives.
Retrospectives done well are powerful. When not done well or only given lip-service, they carry risks that can be gravely damaging. A team (or teams of teams) retrospects at regular intervals to determine how to improve. One of the Twelve Principles of Agile Software that supports the Agile Manifesto states:
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Agile Manifesto
Done well, teams delve into what’s working and how to amplify those actions and behaviors. They:
- Look deeply and without blame at things that went wrong
- Try to understand what happened
- Identify what will prevent a repeat in the future
- Assimilate lessons about their collective actions and behaviors
The dialog is without Deflection, Defensiveness, or Dismissal. When the team has made improvement or entered an item in the backlog, they don’t resent or regret. They move on.
Let’s look at some of the risks of not doing retrospectives well and the resulting detrimental impact.
No Retrospective
As an Agile Coach working with all kinds of teams, more often than you would think, I hear:
- “Don’t get any value from retros, so we don’t do them.”
- “We cancel our retros frequently because we are dealing with so many fires.”
- “No time for improvement. We need to keep the team working at full utilization on the next set of features.”
Clearly, these teams are not embracing a fundamental Agile principle. They do not reap the full benefit of what an agile way of working offers. By not taking time to understand how to improve actions and behaviors, these teams repeat the same mistakes.
Without sincere, open reflection absent of Deflection, Defensiveness, and Dismissal, there can be no learning. Without learning, there can be no understanding, no growth, no improvement.
Surface Retrospective
In Surface Retrospectives you hear a good deal about “great teamwork” and very little about how the team can improve. If the team does discuss what didn’t go well, it typically stems from external forces. The team is unable to control those forces. (Perhaps we should try to improve that!) I call these surface retrospectives, as they do not dive deeply into what went well. (Why did we have great teamwork? What made that easier for us this time?) Nor do they discuss beyond a surface level what didn’t go well. As a coach, this is a sign of artificial harmony within a team. Team members do not have enough trust to dig more deeply without fearing the 3-Headed Monster of Deflection, Defensiveness, and Dismissal.
Teams that engage in Surface Retrospectives do not improve as they believe they have no missteps within their control from which to learn. They do not address the artificial harmony within the team as they are reluctant to discover why it exists within the team. An Agile Coach or experienced servant-leader Scrum Master must help a team breakthrough Surface Retrospectives.
Blame-Game Retrospective
I was working with a client team during a working agreements session. We had one person vehemently opposed to agreeing to conduct retrospectives. The force of the emotion behind his words as he expressed his disdain for the practice was palpable. It washed over everyone in the session and took us all by surprise. I gently coaxed him to share more of why he felt retrospectives were “useless.” We learned he had some extremely painful experiences with retrospectives in the past. When Leaders weaponize retrospectives, teams Deflect, Defend, or Dismiss valuable lessons and retrospectives become worse than useless. These blame-game retrospectives cause pain, recalled fresh and forceful years after it is experienced.
Useful retrospectives are not about finding or assigning blame. They are an opportunity to look at our actions, decisions, and behaviors and to learn what to amplify or change going forward. Used for anything else, they become a dreadful experience that serves no one.
In the past, I was responsible for instituting a root cause analysis (RCA) process for major production incidents. At the start of each RCA meeting, I reiterated three things:
- The purpose of the RCA meeting is to learn and improve, not to assign blame.
- We are not going to Deflect, Defend, or Dismiss any contribution during the meeting.
- Before we point out something another team/person did or didn’t do, we must first point out something the speaker or the speaker’s function may have done to contribute to the incident.
These ground rules put everyone in the appropriate mindset to approach the analysis in a productive spirit. When management asked who was to blame, our collective response was, “Here is where we collectively failed and what we are going to do differently going forward.”
The Root Cause
So why does the 3-Headed Monster of Deflection, Defensiveness, or Dismissal rear their ugly heads in retrospectives?
- There is a fundamental lack of trust within the team. It prevents them to from going beyond surface comments to get to the heart of their challenges.
- Teams have a fundamental lack of trust outside the team, creating fear that someone will use findings/improvements against the team or individuals within it.
- The team does not focus on delivering collective results as a team. Therefore, it is not a cross-functional team and room exists to single out individuals or siloed disciplines within a team.
Summary
As an Agile Leader do not minimize the importance of the team building trust both within the team and with those external to the team. Team-building activities can help here. However, teams build a greater degree of trust through doing real work and trust takes time to develop. Leaders and teams must be patient and nurture trust. Be on guard and do not do nor allow any behavior that will break trust. Months to build, minutes to break.
Also, Leaders must ensure that the team focuses on delivering as an entire team and not as parts of a team. As Agile Leaders we need to ensure that we measure teams on their collective results and not the individual contributions.
By not focusing on fostering trust and collective results, we allow the 3-Headed monster of Deflection, Defensiveness, and Dismissal to creep in and derail teams’ retrospectives. The result…learning stifles, improvement is impossible, and retrospectives are useless. Nurture trust and focus on collective results to tame that 3-Headed Monster!
Until we can be together again….be well.