One of the core components of team adaptation theory is that for teams to increase their adaptability (read: agility), they must reflect on past activities. If you look at any high performing team you will notice they all have one thing in common. All high performing teams take time to reflect on past activities so they can find ways to improve. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. All high performing teams do it. If you look at high performing teams in sports, business, law enforcement, the military, etc., then you will find teams that perform some type of retrospective. Those teams may not call it a retrospective, but they still reflect to answer the same basic questions: What did we do? What have we learned? What should we do differently? Where can we improve? Sadly, many teams view retrospectives with disdain. People are rarely motivated to do the hard work that retrospectives demand. The result is a meeting that produces very little in the way of learning let alone strengthening a team’s adaptability.
Teams often experience two types of work situations. Work, or simply W for the purposes of this article, is typical work that the team knows how to do well and is considered routine. The second type is work prime or W’. W’ is work that is not routine and is caused by some disruptive event that the team did not intend. The team must work in non-routine ways to overcome the disruptive event. Once the disruptive event has passed the team must reflect on what happened, the activities they performed, and what they learned through the process. This reflection must occur soon after the disruptive event passes. The longer a team waits, the less value the team reaps from reflecting—people’s memories have a tendency to fade rather quickly. Teams that take the time to reflect strengthen and increase their adaptability. When certain events reoccur, events that would otherwise cause lesser teams to fail, the highly adaptive team views the events as ‘no big deal.’ Why? Because they know how to respond.
The team retrospective is arguably the most important event for Agile teams.
The path to poor retrospectives.
Teams do not set out to have poor retrospectives. Rather, teams start with good intent, but the nature of their circumstances cause them to develop bad habits regarding how to reflect on past performance. The path to poor retrospectives tends to follow the four stages of team development (forming, storming, norming, and performing).
During the forming stage, team members are energized about the future. Most team members are excited to be a part of the team and their journey ahead. The team begins working in earnest. When teams in the forming stage hold a retrospective things are new. People often do not have meaningful feedback because a) they are trying to figure out how they fit in on the team; and b) things are so new that people don’t really know what to offer in terms of performance feedback at the team level. The result are team retrospectives that fail to produce anything of value for the entire team.
At the storming stage things get more interesting. Team members are in regular conflict with each other. There’s a lot to talk about during a retrospective. Unfortunately for many teams, the retrospectives becomes a place for more storming to occur. Team members often voice their struggles and the meeting develops into little more than a gripe session. Teams may come up with valuable insights on which to improve, but many teams at this stage struggle to get their daily work done. Placing a new task on the to-do list, even if that task is designed to make things better, is not something many team members relish.
The dust begins to settle when the team gets into the norming stage. By this point, however, it is common for team members to view the retrospective as a time waster. It’s another hour on the calendar spent doing something of little value. That time could be better spent meeting with stakeholders or just getting work done. The sum total of value from retrospectives, up to this point, has been 1 part nothing with 2 parts gripe session. It should come as no surprise that team members roll their eyes when the next retrospective meeting occurs. So team members go into the retrospective looking to get out of it as quickly as possible. Since the team is norming members don’t really offer much in the way of improvement because things already feel like their improving. Many teams have simply found workarounds for the things they struggle with and those workarounds are ‘just the way we have to work.’
Contrary to popular belief most teams do not get to the performing stage. Some people leave the team to take a new job elsewhere. Team members may get picked to be part of some new team on some new project. The scope of the team may drastically change, like getting more responsibility, which constrains the team to the norming stage, or worse, the team falls backwards to one of the previous stages. What doesn’t change is the team members’ view of the value of the retrospective.
Even if a team makes it to the performing stage that does not mean the team is a high performing team. If you think back to being a student in school, it’s good and acceptable to get a C or B in a class, but it’s the A+ grades that are considered excellent and high performing.
Skills are required to enhance retrospectives.
Too many organizations place too high of an emphasis on servant leadership. Servant leaders are great, but servant leaders are a big part of why retrospectives lack value for many teams. Transformational leadership is needed in retrospectives—that, and someone with good facilitation skills.
Servant leaders are often too willing to take a back seat in the hopes the team will self-organize and come up with meaningful solutions.
Transformational leaders embody servant leadership; however, they also excel at rallying people together in pursuit of a common vision. Transformational leaders will point to what the ideal team looks like and then challenge team members to get there.
Another skill that’s needed is the ability to quantify team improvement. Few teams do this. Let’s ballpark some figures to gain a simplified understanding of what I mean.
Let’s say we have a team of 10 people with an average salary of $100,000. It costs an organization about $1,000,000 per year to operate that team. At some point someone will say, “Getting people together for an hour to gripe about problems that never get solved is a waste of money.” That someone would be right. After all, to get those 10 people together for one hour will cost approximately $480.
Now let’s say the team encounters some disruptive event on a regular, or even semi-regular, basis. That event could be some manual process that must occur whenever someone makes a special request. A team member must spend some amount of time fixing the issue. If the issue has existed for awhile, the team probably sees the event as routine work or W. The work may be routine (the team does it all the time and knows how to do it), but the work is not efficient nor effective. The work is really W’. When a team perceives something as W, rather than as W’, a team will rarely think to address the issue in their retrospective.
For the purposes of this article let’s say the disruptive event takes one person one hour to fix (a relatively small event). On our team of 10 that means it costs the organization about $48 dollars. Well let’s look at some costs based on how often the event occurs totaled up for a single year.
Once per day = $17,520
Once per week = $2,496
Once per month = $576
Once per year = $48
These numbers may not seem like a lot, being that the numbers are straight cost comparisons. The opportunity costs, however, are not included, which could have bigger impacts on organizational performance.
If the team was able to spend one retrospective solving the problem, then the retrospective paid for itself. The event wastes more dollars per month ($576) than the cost of the retrospective for one hour ($480).
Keep in mind this is a very crude example.
The purpose of my example is to illustrate the value of thinking quantitatively about retrospectives, and how teams must develop the skills to think quantitatively if they wish to add value through their retrospectives.
The cost of retrospectives.
Another way to improve retrospectives is to view the meeting as waste. Retrospective meetings are not things customers want to pay for. Therefore, the retrospective is a wasteful activity. However, retrospectives are necessary if any team wishes to improve. An interesting question to ask is, how much do retrospectives cost? Below are some calculations based on the frequency of retrospectives over one year using the above team as an example.
Once per week (52/year) = $24,960
Twice a month (26/year) = $12,480
Once per month (12/year) = $5,760
Twice a year (2/year) = $2,880
Once a year (1/year) = $480
The challenge for any team is to determine if your team adds more value to the organization than it costs to have your retrospectives in the first place. If you are adding more value than it costs, then you should be streamlining processes, improving the quality of life of employees, and making your organization a better place to work. The retrospective will move from a costly activity to a value/revenue generator for your company.
Conclusion
Retrospectives are necessary for any team that wishes to become a high performing team. Unfortunately, retrospectives are often viewed as a waste of time and resources because of how teams mature. Teams need to shift their mindset about retrospectives by developing skills to facilitate great retrospectives and to quantify improvement opportunities. By making retrospectives time well spent for team members, the retrospective can become a value-add for organizations.