Killing Retrospectives
I fired this popular Agile ceremony, and hired a better way.
Ah, the beloved retrospective.
For most Scrum/Agile managers, the retrospective is a crucial ceremony. It helps a software delivery team find flaws to fix in their flow.
I get it. In retrospect, I once was big on retros.
Years ago, I constantly did retros with team members. Quarterly, monthly or biweekly reviews to optimize all our processes, from sales to design to development.
I learned much from these retros.
But.
A nagging thought grew. And grew.
Why embrace retros, where we learn —mainly after it’s too late to fix?
Which led to my moment of clarity:
Retros can uncover root causes of failure, but they’re ill-suited for nipping issues in the bud.
Perhaps, looking back is a mistake more times than not.
Reframe the Retro
If retros are wrong, then what’s right?
To answer that, I leveraged this reframe:
Original: Learn from your team’s mistakes.
Reframe: Learn before your team makes a mistake.
While deep diving into Lean and Toyota Kata, I discovered the andon cord.
On the Toyota car assembly line, the andon cord was a rope a worker pulled to halt production when a quality or process problem surfaced.
Any worker could pull, at any time. Workers were encouraged to pull at the first sign of manufacturing trouble.
Once pulled, everyone stopped work. Production didn’t resume until the problem was addressed.
This was my aha moment! Hire the andon cord, fire the retrospective.
Here’s how I set it up the andon cord for the last team I managed:
- Kill all retros. (Don’t give the team a way to defer/delay issues.)
- The andon cord is virtual. I “placed” our cord in a real-time message channel (Slack) that everyone frequently monitored.
- Zero prerequisites for pulling the cord. Anyone on the team can pull, at any time, for any reason*.
- Once pulled, everyone immediately stops work to discuss.
- Work restarts only after the issue is 100% resolved.
*Does your issue seem too trivial for the andon cord? Pull the cord. The issue may seem trivial to you but important to someone else. Don’t let a trivial issue grow into a monster.
With the andon cord, every person shares equal footing to get the team’s full, immediate attention.
The andon cord prevents issue gatekeeping. No manager sweeping your issue under the rug, or asking you to just “wait and see” how things turn out.
If the issue is important to you, pull. No approval needed.
I’ve never had anyone abuse the andon cord. My biggest challenge was the opposite: Getting people to overcome the fear that pulling would upset teammates by interrupting their work.
To overcome this fear, I described the andon cord to the team as merely a request for an “on-demand retro” focused on a single issue. And since we got rid of regularly scheduled retros, we won’t lose much, if any, development time.
In the first 12 weeks of the andon cord, it was pulled three times.
As a team lead, I was much happier to learn about an issue at the moment of pain, and address it immediately.
The team solved problems before they got worse. No kicking the can down the road. No running out of retro meeting time to fully explore and discuss.
And finally, no problem no pull.
How many retros have you been in where no major issues surfaced, but you still had to muddle through it? Retros where people scrounged up hinky issues to appear engaged and fill up a whiteboard?
The andon cord does away with forced retrospective theatrics.
To be clear, I’m fine with anyone who uses retros, if it works for your team.
Like I said, used to be a big fan.
But if your team’s retros cause more pain than gain, give the andon cord a try. Share this article with your product lead, or try it out for a few sprints as an experiment. Let me know how it goes!
(P.S. If you’re using Shape Up for your team, the andon cord is a great “emergency brake” in case team dynamics go wrong during a cycle. Especially for a newly formed team that’s never worked together before.)
Nelson Taruc is a design lead at Lextech, where they help some of the world’s most admired companies end enterprise workflow chaos. With Lextech, employees become more effective, efficient and engaged in the enterprise.
