🐦 Saager Mhatre

I'm going out on a limb here and suggest that we dump retros (as usually done) altogether. I see zero value in all those ridiculous games and rituals the coaches seem so enamored of, and in any event, a retro is a conversation, not a formal meeting. Instead, let's improve continuously. Continuous improvement is an attitude, not a meeting. Continuous improvement is something we do all day, every day. If something goes wrong, fix it. Right now. Why wait for some meeting two weeks down the road? Quality is a culture, not a meeting, A retro is not a putting-out-fires session because we put out the fires while they're still small and easily quenched. A retro is not triggered by something going wrong. It is a conversation about how we can improve. Maybe somebody on the team has just read about something that they think we could benefit from. Let's sit down and discuss that. That's your "retro." A scheduled, periodic conversation about how we can improve is also valuable, but that's not what most people do in their retrospectives. On highly functioning teams where quality is a frequent topic, that scheduled conversation doesn't have to happen every two weeks. Back in the day, we had quarterly off-sites that all the teams attended. There were classes. There were discussions. There were plenty of social activities and meals, so that people could talk to people on other teams.

The workplace is not a battlefield where our co-workers are the enemy. Any system of management that sets up a competitive environment will always be inferior to one based on trust and collaboration. (And I'm willing to go out on a limb with that "always." I've never seen an exception.)

Let's start by stating the obvious: The corporate behemoths are dictatorial, soulless hellholes that dehumanize people and do active harm to their employees. (Now tell us what you really think, Allen 😄.) Every one of them (at least the ones I've seen) is vastly ineffective in how they do things compared to smaller, more humane organizations. They succeed because they have more money than Croesus. Treating them as some sort of a north star is misguided at best, and modeling your smaller organization after them is a sure path to failure. They cannot change, so virtually none of what I write about applies to them. If you work at a place like that, my heart goes out to you, but imagining that every place must be like that is myopic. If you want to see how things should be done, take a look at Valve Corp. (The Valve New Employee Handbook is a must-read [t.ly/pbBIj].) Valve is a $5B-annual-revenue company with about 500 people. (That revenue-to-people ratio alone should get you thinking—huge payrolls are about manager ego and fiefdom building, not effectiveness. The point of diminishing returns comes very early.) Valve has NO mid- or team-level management, and their teams are entirely self-selecting. They've been doing this for almost two decades, so this is not some flash-in-the-pan, wide-eyed idealist organization. If 500 people can do it, 5,000 (or 50,000) can as well. Just split the behemoth into smaller units, as W. L. Gore famously does. Another great company is Menlo Innovations, which is a 200-person agency that has created an ideal workplace over the past 25 years. This is the sort of place where people bring their babies to work. Their CEO Rich Sheridan's book "Joy Inc." [link.amazon/B0iKa3sc7] is another must-read. Rich has also given several talks on YouTube if you're pressed for time. So many of us work in hellholes or hellhole wannabes that we've come to believe that that's the only way to do things, but it isn't. It's worth at least knowing there are alternatives.