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.
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