The effectiveness of a retro rests upon the empowerment of the entire team. If the team isn't empowered to own their own success/failure, then there is no point in doing a retro.<p>From my experience, business units need just as much coaching on agility as development teams. It's hard to change culture, but it's essential the BU gets out of the way (let the team own how they plan on delivering a solution) and facilitates empowerment of change for the team to thrive.<p>Again, from experience, the main driver of apprehension is middle management feeling the squeeze from making everything transparent. They're use to being the routers (worst case, bottlenecks) of information and work, when in reality their role should be to empower the team with the resources they need to own their work. The shift in focus from delegation to facilitation is essential to the whole process, making retros more effective once realized. Empowerment builds in psychological safety for the team to sink their teeth into their own issues and solve those issues themselves.<p>Another main driver of apprehension is power within the team. If there are only 1 or 2 main members of the team that dictate the pace of the conversation, that crowds out the rest of the team from buying in and/or providing their insights. The entire team needs to be empowered to own their success, not just a handful of members.
Retrospectives are great if they actually lead to change. Unfortunately that’s often not the case. The same issues keep coming up repeatedly and soon the retrospective is just another chore.<p>I would love to see retrospectives where managers one or two levels up attend (usually it’s just the devs), listen to issues and address things that need support from a larger point of view. Agile theoretically should transform whole organizations that way.
The present team I'm on is really good at being open and honest during our retros but we can never seem to do anything with the action items for improvement that comes out of them. We've tried everything from mentioning it explicitly in our daily stand-up or making it a zero-point story in our current sprint but nothing seems to work.