Retrospectives are the most important Agile meetings

29th October 2024

Retrospectives are the most important agile meeting. Why? Because we're all human.

Retrospectives fulfill two very important functions - they give members of a team a voice and allow them to connect.

Voice

Companies, like our society in general, are often thought to be meritocracies - where our ideas are important and if they are the best ideas, they will naturally gain traction and rise to the top.

This is not true - for society nor workplaces. Workplaces are actually oligarchies - a few at the top dictate the rules that all underneath must follow. The C-level executives and board are at the top and they ultimately make all the decisions and hold all the power.

This is most visible when decisions are made that don't seem to make sense for the majority of workers. The recent push for a full return to office for amazon, for example. The majority of workers appear to hate it, but that doesn't matter because it is the will of the board and C-level executives.

This is not to say that ordinary workers have no power in the workplace at all - they have some, and the higher up in managerial roles you go, the more power you get. Each layer has more power, but still exponentially less than the level above.

If workers band together, they can stand against unpopular decisions, but the balance of power is so skewed that it requires a huge amount of effort and nearly unanimous agreement amongst all workers to do so.

No single meeting can change any of this, but retrospectives help the most.

They give workers the forum and opportunity to spotlight things that do not work and even come up with ideas to fix them. If a process does not work, or is unfair, it is literally the point of this meeting to make that better.

All it takes is for one worker to bring up an issue with process and others to agree, then it can start a movement to fix it, even if it is against the will of management.

Highlighting a problem with a core process takes a massive amount of courage though. If workers do not feel safe then they will be disengaged during retrospectives. They might suggest a few cursory, surface-level problems but they will not dare to rock the boat by pointing out larger process issues.

This is a side-effect of the lack of power that individual workers have compared to management, and again no single meeting can change this, but I believe that retrospectives help the most.

Connection

In workplaces in media, like Brooklyn 99, the office (US), Parks and Recreation, all the staff are friends. All pitch in to help each other out, they face challenges and tackle them together, win or lose. They all care deeply.

They might be portrayed as dysfunctional, but that is usually only surface level. Certain staff might appear to be rivals or enemies, but to mark someone as an enemy or rival is to care about them, even if you don't like them. Aren't love and hate said to be two sides to the same coin?

In most teams I have joined in real life in the UK, staff work while they are contracted to do so, do the bare minimum and don't go far out of their way to improve anything. Perhaps they cared once, but too many times they have had ideas for the best of the company that have been squashed by their managers.

Workers might have surface level interactions with others, but more often they are utterly indifferent to their very existence.

Why should they care about what happens at a workplace that they feel fundamentally does not care about them? They are apathetic.

They certainly have a point. However, logical though this line of thought may seem, I argue that it is in fact illogical and outright harmful to their very humanity.

It is not logical because workers spend eight hours of their day doing work. That is a very long time to do something that you fundamentally disagree with, week after week, month after month.

Being apathetic is being numb. Your mind shuts down. You essentially waste half of the time you are awake. Is it not better, if you can, to find some way to care about what you're doing?

Some jobs genuinely do not need to exist, but I think most fulfill a purpose, however small and humble that purpose might be. if the job has a reason for existing then fundamentally there is no reason that we need be apathetic towards it. We might wish it were larger, but it is not fundamentally pointless.

This is where I believe retrospectives can help. Not in all cases, in all workplaces, but it's the best chance you have.

Retrospectives are an opportunity to be vulnerable with those in your team. Start small, point out a small area in a codebase perhaps that irritates you. If others have worked within it, chances are they will be irritated by it too.

That resonance between humans is the starting point to do something about it, and the safety found in that resonance allows you to bring up larger and larger problems until you feel comfortable talking about core, fundamental problems and genuinely finding a way to tackle them, together.

I don't think it's possible to get to those idealised media workplaces, but I think we all deserve a workplace in which we can care.

Conclusion

Apathy is hell.

No single meeting can remedy it, nor be a shield against it, but retrospectives can help.

They can be a first step towards connecting with your team, towards changing things for the better. Or they can help to uncover issues that if left unchecked would cause a gradual decay into apathy.

It takes effort and courage to point out problems, to be vulnerable, but isn't the risk worthwhile if it pushes us away from nihilism?