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I truly wish that teams used retrospectives in this manner instead of the shallow conversations that are often devoid of blame. Not that every sprint needs to have a deep, impactful retro, but it's nice to talk about shortcomings, be able to accept blame, and move forward with actionable items. Everyone comes out ahead.

discuss

zdragnar|1 year ago

Assigning (and accepting) responsibility is, I think, rather different from the "blame" that such retro's try to avoid.

You have to have a very safe work environment for that to happen. Otherwise, saying "I was blocked by person X" finding the wrong ears is a great way for person X to wind up on a PIP if the company's management is sufficiently inept.

I do miss being able to be honest at work.

Edit: rereading my comment, I realized I could have been clearer. What I really was getting at was the motivation: how do we help each other avoid the problem in the future, versus "everyone but person X can feel okay about what happened".

testudovictoria|1 year ago

Same with me. By blame, I really meant responsibility.

We missed a pretty big deadline not too long ago. In the retro, I accepted a lion's share of the responsibility. I'm a senior dev rather than a team lead, but I had my head down during a lot of the technical discussions and PRs rather than diving deep with the juniors and mid-levels. I apologized for it.

I have made myself more available since then. PRs have been under more scrutiny from everyone, and I feel like the constructive feedback and requests for comments have been flowing more openly.

sgarland|1 year ago

Fully agree. My wife is a Montessori teacher, and her observation has been that people are afraid of failure, even in an environment where failure is an expected part of learning. There are some cultural differences, but she says that it’s a fairly accurate baseline.

There’s an excellent talk [0] that discusses why and how blameless has missed the mark. Somewhat compressed version of the same talk by the same person here [1].

[0]: https://youtu.be/gfINfi2K1lE

[1]: https://youtu.be/l2CdjZUAmb0