Retrospectives Antipatterns

If you use retrospectives, or any kind of meeting where people are supposed to discuss and learn from their discussions, you will have experienced less efficient sessions from time to time. There is no wonder in that, and it happens to most people. This article describes and offers solutions for three of these unfortunate situations: skipping generating insights, getting lost in things you can't change, and being dominated by a loudmouth.

15 February 2023


Photo of Aino Corry

Aino Corry, author of "Retrospectives Antipatterns", is a teacher, a technical conference editor and retrospectives facilitator. She holds a masters degree and a ph.d. in computer science. She also teaches how to teach Computer Science to teachers, and thus lives up to the name of her company; Metadeveloper. Aino has lived in Stockholm, Lund, and Cambridge, but she is now back in Aarhus, Denmark, where she lives with her family, and a growing collection of plush cephalopods. In her spare time, she runs and sings (but not at the same time).


The concept Retrospective has existed almost forever, but not always with that name. As long as humans have existed we have looked back at an activity together, to try to learn from it. After a hunt, after a birth, after a game, after surgery, etc.

Norman Kerth was the first to name it “Retrospective” in the IT world, in his book: Project Retrospectives - a Handbook for Team Reviews from 2001. He described a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. With detailed scenarios, imaginative illustrations and step-by-step instructions, this book started my journey as a retrospective facilitator. I loved the idea and I began implementing it, first in my own team, then in other teams and later, outside my organization. The activities “Prime Directive”, “Developing a Time Line”, “I’m Too Busy” and other activities are from his book.

Later, Diana Larsen and Esther Derby wrote the book: Agile Retrospectives - Making Good Teams Great. This introduced shorter retrospectives that would fit into agile processes. This was a game changer for me. Their book helped me to plan shorter, more efficient retrospectives, but also contains tools for the facilitator that helped me with the actual process of planning the retrospectives in a more efficient way.

Before Norm Kerth’s book, we only knew about post-mortems. These are longer reflections conducted after something has gone wrong. Post-mortems are very useful as a tool for learning from mistakes. Done right, they can have a healing effect on the people involved, but are not the same as retrospectives. We do retrospectives, even if things are going well. This is why the subtitle of Derby Larsen’s book is “- making good teams great”.

But, my practical experience with retrospectives also showed me how easily a retrospective can be inefficient. If you don’t follow the idea of a retrospective and only go through the motions, you will waste time. Due to the popularity of agile methodologies, retrospectives have become very widespread. This success has become a problem for retrospectives. Everyone has to have them, but they do not spend the time to learn how to facilitate them in the right way. This has led to many unconstructive, and sometimes even harmful, retrospectives. When people claim that retrospectives are a waste of time, I often agree with them, when I hear how they do it. After some years I started to notice patterns in what went wrong, also in the ones facilitated by me.

A story from Denmark

An organization had decided to be more agile in their way of developing software. As a part of that they introduced retrospectives as a means to learn. Some of the team members felt that the retrospectives were “in the way” of “real” work. They suggested that they could be shorter than the 90 minutes booked for them. Since the facilitator was not very experienced in retrospectives, she decided to accept.

To spend as little time as possible, they shortened them down. This had many negative consequences. Let us focus on one here, an anti-pattern I call Wheel of Fortune[1]. In a real-world wheel of fortune you sometimes get a prize, and sometimes you lose. Winning or losing is random, and you aren’t doing anything to improve the odds. This can happen in a team’s retrospective as well.

The facilitator decided to use the popular “Start, Stop, Continue” activity to gather data. But to save time, they skipped generating insights, which is one of the 5 stages of a retrospective. Instead they jumped from gathering the data to deciding what to start doing, what to stop doing, and what to continue doing.

For this activity, the facilitator put up three posters, one with the word "Start", one with "Stop", and one with "Continue". She then asked the team to write post-it notes and stick them on the posters. One of the notes read “Start pair programming”, another “Stop having so many meetings”. The team could create action points out of these: “Three hours of pair programming, three days a week”. And “no meetings on Wednesdays and never meetings after lunch”. And in 20 minutes, the retrospective was over!

This way of holding a retrospective can have dire consequences. If the post-it notes only show solutions to symptoms, not the actual problems, you can only fix the surface. Perhaps the reason for the team not having pair programming is not that they forget, but that there is not enough psychological safety. In this case, pushing them to schedule it in the calendar will not help. Either they will still not do it, or they will do it and people will feel uncomfortable and leave the team, or even the company.

Another cause for not having pair programming, could be that they do not know how to do it in a remote setting. Again, this is a problem that is not solved by putting pair programming in the calendar.

The same applies to the note about meetings. The problem with the meetings might be the quality and not the quantity. In that case, having fewer meetings will not solve the problem, only make it less obvious. When teams ask for fewer meetings, it is often improved meeting hygiene that can solve the real problem.

Wheel of Fortune

When a team “solves” symptoms instead of problems, the problems will still be there, and they will show up again. As in a real Wheel of Fortune they might get lucky. Perhaps some of the things they solve might have been the real problems. But often we only see the symptoms and we rush to ‘solutions’ that don’t address root causes. The result is that even these short retrospectives feel like a waste of time, because it is a waste of time to discuss and react only to symptoms.

An anti-pattern must have a refactored solution, a description of a solution that is better than the antipattern solution. In this case, the refactored solution is to make sure to generate insights before you decide what to do. Before you jump to conclusions. You can do this with a simple discussion about the issues that come up. Or with a “5 whys” interview. If it looks like a complex problem, a fishbone analysis might be useful. Examples of complex problems are “missing a deadline”, or “not following the peer review process”. Stated like this, they sound simple, but the short description hides a complexity: These problems can have many different causes.

In the Soup

At the next retrospective another antipattern showed up. The team wanted to discuss the impact of the lousy software their vendors provided them with. The quality of this was a constant problem for the team. Their own software systems were greatly affected by this, and they had tried to escalate the problem to management. The team had discussed this before, many times. Every time they discussed it, they got frustrated and sad and nothing changed. It made the retrospectives feel like a waste of time, because it was a waste of time to discuss things they could not change. This is an example of the antipattern In the Soup.

When you are in the soup, you are spending time on things you cannot improve. Instead of learning about and improving the issues you are able to change.

The refactored solution is to use an activity called In the Soup, where you ask the team to divide the things they are discussing into things they can do something about, things they can influence, and things that are in the soup. When things are in the soup, they are a part of life that you cannot change. Your time is better spent accepting and finding a way to adapt to the situation. Or changing your situation by removing yourself from the soup. You can use this activity right after you have gathered data as shown below. Or you can use it when you decide what to do in order to not leave the retrospective with action points that are not in your power to implement.

In the Soup activity               during Gather Data

Figure 1: Things we can do, things we can influence, things that are in the soup.

Loudmouth

In this team they now know how to focus their time on the things they can change, and they have learned how valuable it is to spend time on generating insights. But they still have one problem. They have a Loudmouth in the team. In all the discussions in the retrospectives (and in all other meetings) this loudmouth interrupts and tells long stories and makes it impossible for other team members to take part. The facilitator tries to invite other team members to speak up, but things do not change.

This antipattern is something that is often found, but it is not hard to solve. The first thing to be aware of is why it is a problem. Some people might say that if someone has something to say, then they should be allowed to say it, and I agree. But for a retrospective, the time is set aside for a team to share, appreciate and learn together. And if only part of the team is able to do that, the time may be partly wasted.

The refactored solution for a team with a loudmouth is to stay away from plenary discussions. Instead divide people into smaller groups, or even pairs, to discuss subjects. You can also introduce more writing and moving of post-its instead of speaking. [2] It can even be beneficial to talk to the loudmouth after the retrospective. They might not be aware of the effect they have on others, and often they are very grateful to learn this about themselves. I have worked with loudmouths that found it changed more aspects of their lives to be aware of this tendency. Some people are what we call “active thinkers”, and they need to talk or do something to think. Obviously they need to be loud when they are thinking, but there is no harm meant by it.

In this article you have been introduced to three of the most common antipatterns in retrospective facilitation, and you now have some tips and tricks on how to avoid to be stuck in one of them. But remember that the most important skill a facilitator can have is not to know a lot of activities by heart, but to listen, to use their intellect to de-escalate conflict and to continue to reflect and learn what works for them.


Further Reading

You can read more about these antipatterns for retrospectives in my book Retrospectives Antipatterns. In the book you will find 23 antipatterns for retrospectives, each of them describing a common challenge with facilitating retrospectives, practical ideas for how to overcome that challenge, and a personal anecdote from me about when I found myself in that antipattern. The book is based on more than 15 years of experience in facilitating retrospectives, and more than 20 years of teaching in academia and industry. I spent some time researching how to teach and learn computer science and in that research I found a lot of input to why some things work and some things do not work in teaching as well as facilitation.

Footnotes

1: Every antipattern has a picture as well as a name to make it easier for people to remember them and be aware of them. It is often an octopus because I love octopuses

2: Funnily enough, these suggestions work with people who are very quiet as well for Loudmouths.

Significant Revisions

15 February 2023: Published