> Which is why the "retrospectives are useless" crowd spins me up so badly.

When I see complaints about retrospectives from software devs they're usually about agile or scrum retrospective meetings, which have evolved to be performative routines. They're done every sprint (or week, if you're unlucky) and even if nothing happens the whole team might have to sit for an hour and come up with things to say to fill the air.

In software, the analysis following a mishap is usually called a post-mortem. I haven't seen many complaints about those have no value. Those are usually highly appreciated. Thought some times the "blameless post-mortem" people take the term a little too literally and try to avoid exploring useful failures if they might cause uncomfortable conversations about individuals making mistakes or even dropping the ball.

>When I see complaints about retrospectives from software devs they're usually about agile or scrum retrospective meetings, which have evolved to be performative routines.

You mean to tell me that this comment section where we spew buzzwords and reference the same tropes we do for every "disaster" isn't performative.

Post mortems are absolutely key in creating process improvements. If you think about an organization's most effective processes, they are likely just representations of years of fixed errors.

Regarding blamelessness, I think it was W. Edwards Deming who emphasized the importance of blaming process over people, which is always preferable, but its critical for individuals to at least be aware of their role in the problem.

Agree. I am obligated to run those retrospectives and the SNR is very poor.

It is nice though (as long as there isn't anyone in there that the team is afraid to be honest in front of), when people can vent about something that has been pissing them off, so that I as their manager know how they feel. But that happens only about 15-20% of the time. The rest is meaningless tripe like "Glad Project X is done" and "$TECHNOLOGY sucks" and "Good job to Bob and Susan for resolving the issue with the Acme account"