Fourteen minutes.
The shortest retrospective we ever ran — and what was already on the page when we walked in.
Lede
The retrospective for the January 19 incident lasted fourteen minutes. It was scheduled for an hour. The thirteen people in the room looked at one another and went back to their week.
What was on the page
The post-mortem was already written when we sat down. It had been written, in stages, by the system that ran the incident: a timeline, a root cause, a list of three contributing factors, two action items with owners, and a paragraph titled “What went well.” The last paragraph is the one that catches people. It is not flattery. It is a list of decisions the system flagged as having shortened the incident.
The questions we didn't need
A retrospective traditionally exists to answer four questions: what happened, why, what will we change, and what did we do well. Each of those questions had an answer in front of us. The room had been called to validate the answers, not to discover them.
A retrospective is not a writing room. It is a reading room.
The validation took fourteen minutes — eleven for the timeline, two for the action items, one for someone to ask, and be reassured, that the “what went well” section was fair to the team that had done the rolling back.
The calendar block
The hour-long block on the calendar is now a fourteen-minute block. The forty-six minutes we returned went, mostly, into pull request reviews and one nap. We are not sure what to do with a job that occasionally ends early. We are working on getting used to it.