I frequently hear teams say: “We talk about the same things over and over and nothing changes.” Every time, it tells me they’ve missed the point of the retrospective.
They think the meeting is the improvement. It isn’t. The meeting is where you decide what to change. The improvement doesn’t happen until you actually change it.
Most teams I meet are running retrospectives because they’re on the calendar, and nobody questions what’s on the calendar.
They brainstorm, group the stickies, vote, write down the actions, close. Then next time, the actions from last time are still sitting there undone, so they brainstorm the same problems again. No wonder they get frustrated, all we’re doing is rehashing the past.
A couple of times I’ve walked into a retrospective where the team hadn’t done any of the actions from the last one. I asked whether those actions still mattered, and when they said yes, I stopped the meeting. “Then go do them now; this meeting is over.”
The room then goes quiet, and people look at each other, waiting for the catch. Nobody ends a meeting halfway through. You run out the time whether or not there’s anything left to do. So sending everyone back to their desks with time on the clock breaks a rule they didn’t know they were following. Go do the thing you already agreed to do, because the retrospective was never the point. The change was, and the change isn’t done yet.
The retrospective is one of the most important meetings your team has. Run it without improving, and you’ve wasted everyone’s time.
If you want to run retrospectives that actually change things, that’s what my course Retrospective Magic is about.