The Good, The Bad, and The Mail-It-In

Teams benefit from regularly examining the ledger of what Worked Well and what Needs Improvement.

The agile Retrospective is the periodic, iteration-ending team-reflection session met with joy, dread, or indifference.

What's Your Experience?

I'm curious,

1. Are you comfortable with the heavy lifting called for in true team reflection?
2. What were the defining characteristics of your most productive retrospectives? 
3. What is the appropriate level of ceremony? 

My Experience

Retrospectively, I can recall The Good, The Bad, and The Mail-It-In.

One team had the common sense to rotate leadership amongst team members, so each retrospective had a different flavor. It made it lively. It kept it fresh. All good.

Another team, having grown impatient with the lack of candor, adopted a variation of the ritual of passing the rock, dubbed passing the action figure. An action figure, bestowed with alchemistic powers, was passed to each team member.

If you held it, you were expected to say something that was bothering you, something uncomfortable, something controversial, or something wildly informative about team dynamics. Again, good.

Other sleep-walking teams mail it in. For those teams, the retro is just another check box on the list of agile ceremonies.

Mail-It-In Retrospectives

I stumbled on a promising antidote for Mail-It-In Retrospectives called Theatre of the Oppressed. Augusto Boal (1931 - 2009) was a Brazilian theatre director, writer and politician. Boal founded Theatre of the Oppressed.

A facet of Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed is Forum theatre described as follows:

1. Actors perform a play with a script that includes a relevant form of oppression.
2. At the end of their first performance, where the oppressed in the script do not overturn their oppressors, the actors begin a second performance of the play. 
3. In the second performance, any audience spectator - called a spect-actor - may call out stop!, then replace of the actor portraying the oppressed character. The actor stays at the side of the spect-actor.
4. The spect-actor tries to overturn the oppression by using methods untried by the actor replaced. 
5. The actors portraying the oppressors then improvise, in response to the spect-actor, attempting to steer the performance back to its original script of unabated oppression.

Some project teams I have participated in coexist with mild, usually subtle, forms of oppression. Oppressive behaviors are uncomfortable to confront. Discussion of these behaviors rarely bubble up in retrospectives. Unresolved, they can be burrs in our collective saddle, or worse. At best, they kill our mojo, often strangling the free flow of ideas.

I don't need to enumerate. They're personal and team issues. You know what they are, so act!