Skip to main content

Group Therapy

If you have ever been part of a large program involving between ten to over hundred teams, then you have surely sat in a program retro session. The higher the level of dysfunction in the organization, the greater the zeal of leadership to organize these and spent hours and weeks to get people to provide candid feedback in on what went well, what didn't and what can be improved. At first blush this would seem like an honest and prudent thing to do - let's all be self-critical and call out our collective failures to perform and see what we could change going forward. 

Reality tends to be a bit different. The highest ranking person in the session will almost always kick off the session by saying this is not about blaming people so don't make anything personal. It's only about process that can be improved. So the group consisting of those who precipitated trouble and those who dealt with its consequences are now left to review their collective feedback  as myriad manifestations of broken process. It is as if there was no human hand in such rampant brokenness - it just happened. 

They are not allowed to bring up the fact that A who is up for a very big promotion refused to let his team take any single action that might rock that promotion boat. This meant that the whole organization had to pay for his unbridled ambition in ways that irreparably hurt the program under retrospection. They are not able to address the other elephant in the room that C, a leader who controls a highly visible function in the company, also runs a consulting business on the side. She takes random days off to balance the demands of her side hustle. While there is no conflict of interest, it manifests in her level of engagement and ability to drive timely resolution when issues are escalated to her. Tremendous chaos ensues as teams proceed with hacks, short-cuts and workarounds absent clear direction from her.

Every last issue discussed pointlessly in these interminably long sessions tie back to some person behaving in ways that create conditions where the program simply cannot succeed. The broken processes are a symptom of  such bad behaviors creating domino effects. By refusing to even acknowledge root cause, the whole exercise devolves to a ridiculous charade. After several hours of useless talk, the expectation is everyone goes back feeling absolved or vindicated as the case might be. As a group therapy session this may have some passing value, in terms of being a catalyst for change, the chances are slim to none. The whole point of organizing a retro is for the people in the positions of power maintain their rights to go on behaving badly without fear of consequences. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more