Is the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive Patronizing?

My understanding of the Retrospective Prime Directive as applied to agile teams is that it is a reaction to the general tendency for people to lay blame. I take it as a reminder to assume people have good intentions most of the time.

Questions like "What does it mean to 'believe' something?" or "What does 'do your best' mean?" smack of the old Monty Python sketch about a mock TV program on philosophy in which the host is reduced to a rapid-fire stream of questions: "What do we mean by the word 'what'? What do we mean by the word 'do'? What do we mean by the word 'we'? What do we mean by the word 'mean'? What do we mean by the word 'by'? What do we mean by the word 'the'?" etc. The question is non-useful because it ignores context and intent.

Another angle on "context" is that the Retrospective Prime Directive isn't an "agile" thing. It's more general than that. It was created to help with all sorts of retrospectives, before there was a thing named "agile." Not only the original blogger, but also the author of the InfoQ article misunderstands this. Ironically, he misunderstands it even while mentioning Norm Kerth's book on retrospectives, which has to do with project retrospectives (the old "post mortem" thing; an event lasting up to 3 days and involving many stakeholders) and nothing to do with "agile" retrospectives (sometimes called "heartbeat retrospectives," usually taking 1 to 2 hours and focusing on a single team's continuous improvement efforts).

Naturally, if you don't understand (or choose to ignore) the context of a subject, you will end up asking pointless questions about trivia or nit-picking word meanings.

So, to the author's question: Do I think the Retrospective Prime Directive is useful? I would say it is as useful as any other model, provided we (a) understand the context and (b) remember that a model is only a model.

In context of retrospective I find patronizing laughable at best and offensive at worst. As a grown-up / mature / responsible / professional adult I am able to handle critique well. In fact I encourage as straightforward critique as possible since that helps me speed-up by self-improvement process. Same applies when I point to others mistakes. That said, I'd like to reiterate Dinwiddie's point: by framing the retrospective as the rootcause analysis ("the 5 why's") you're effectively changing the context from reprimanding the person for past mistakes, to preventing the issue from reoccurring in the future. This is what's important. Anything else is just social skills.

A retrospective is about finding out how to avoid problems in the future and for that you need everyone focused on how to do things better. It's not a scapegoating session. Who would come to a meeting where their colleagues riduculed them for not getting something right? That's better left to HR processes.

The prime directive isn't patronising, it's there to focus you on achieving something.

Can we talk about things people did right/wrong? Absolutely. It's the "social skills" of how that's accomplished that's key - highlighting individual performance can be very touchy - especially in a group setting, and it must be done with tact and respect.

It sounds like your version of "straighforward critique" includes respect - so I think you're essentially acting in accordance with the directive. Some people need a little more reminding, and it can be useful to bring up when people start descending into the blame game.

I'm surprised you find it patronizing, I find it refreshing to be in the company of people that care enough about each other to keep the atmosphere free of blame and disrespect.

I thought the "Prime Directive" was "...there should be no interference with the internal development of "pre-warp" civilizations..." Oops - wrong prime directive

it's simply a guiding principal for conducting a retrospective - don't get tripped up with analyzing blame as a root cause or contributing reason for why something didn't work as you expected it - otherwise the foundation of your analysis and resulting findings will fall apart. This doesn't mean that you can't list a finding as ".. the skills of Developer A were not advanced enough for ..." However, without the PD - retrospectives would need to analyze if a developer purposely sabotaged the development effort as a contributing cause to an issue ... then everything else you analyze for improvement is subject to the sabotage.

Assume everyone did their best and use the time in a retrospective to uncover issues that can be improved.

This prime directive makes a lot of sense to me. I've find it easy to look at something someone else did and think "why would they do this?" Not only is this bad for putting people on the defensive in a review but it's a bad way to think about things. More and more I realize that so much work that is done starts with the assumption that what was done before needs to be fixed. While there are always improvements to be made, sometimes things that seem crazy are there for a reason.

In the end, so many of these projects fail to implement those 'stupid' things that were done before and later it is realized that those 'stupid' things were really important and now have to be shoehorned in at the last moment. Later, someone comes along as sees these 'stupid' things that were shoehorned in and decides that the work needs to be redone to eliminate these 'stupid' things and the cycle continues. A good example of this is how so many new tools have no independently deployable artifacts or modular source that can be used with common source control tools.

To me this really just another way of saying "seek first to understand."

Andrei - you're right that the Directive is about "social skills". Anything involving interaction with other people is about social skills. Its a tool to help people remember to focus on the events and not the people. Humans are wired to take criticism as an attack on their status. So changing the focus reduces the chance of flipping people into defensive mode. Even if it doesn't work for you consider the team mate it might help.

Cheers
Mark Levison
Agile Pain Relief Consulting

For those who find the Prime Directive Patronizing, that's fine but instead of just complaining suggest an improvement. Remember its value is to help set a positive tone and move the focus from people to events.

To Angela, Andrei and others how about formulating something new? Perhaps we can bash around a better statement?

Cheers
Mark Levison
Agile Pain Relief Consulting

I don't find Prime Directive in and of itself Patronizing, in fact I am against the interpretation that assumes that Prime Directive contains a subtle suggestion that the Retrospectives have to be patronizing or else they will descent into blame. My position is that, indeed people always do the best they can at the moment, and let us see how things can be improved, just don't be patronizing in the bad sense of the word.

I don't use the Prime Directive as stated in the book. I don't know that retrospective participants actually do believe it about others. I use something else I've borrowed from NLP: The premise that whatever people did, however they behaved, THEY believed (perhaps subconsciously) that the behaviour had a positive intent.

For instance, if a team member doesn't update the status on the task board, that's certainly not "the best they could". But it might well have a positive [unstated] intent, such as "I wanted to keep going," or "others aren't doing it, so by doing it myself, I'm wasting time," or whatever.

In outlining the retro's ground rules, I replace the Prime Directive with "Assume best intent", and explain it as above. I've never had any trouble with people accepting it or not applying it.

Gil

I like Gil's phrasing of "Assume best intent." It seems to me that if you are facilitating a retrospective and you help the team focus on team practices instead of publicly castigating individual team members, then I think you've got it right.