No, we won't remember

TLDR; Memory bad, tools good.

The story

Last week, I was in a team meeting about an incident that had caused a delay in the release of an essential bug fix. After several minutes of back and forth, we concluded that it was due to a lack of handover before someone's holiday. Courageously stepping forward, the principal engineer that had gone on holiday, admitted that they should have organized a meeting before they left. They promised the rest of the team that in the future, they will remember to share what they're working on before leaving. This prompted another engineer to compassionately come forward and offer to keep an eye out on holidays and remind everyone to book their handover meetings. Everyone nodded along, seemingly satisfied that the problem had found a permanent solution. After all, 2 engineers would not forget to do something so apparently obvious after they promised to pay attention to it.

What I think about it

I endeavor to let my team sort their issues out without intervening, I want them to autonomously find a solution they are happy with. More often than not, it's equally as good or better than what I came up with before or during the meeting. By remaining silent through their conversation, I was able to take a step back and realize that we did not address the root cause of the problem.

People forget, and that's ok. We can't help it. We can, however, free ourselves from relying on our memory. Quite frankly, we're usually pretty good at it: we set reminders, we put meetings in our calendars, we take note of actions we intend to take... but there is a reason why our cars beep when we turn them off and there is a baby seat in the back. Even with the best of intentions, for both important and inconsequential things, we forget. Relying on a person to remember to do something, is setting them up for failure.

Relying on a person to remember to do something, is setting them up for failure.

In a retrospective, talking about something that went wrong, we often avoid spending time on issues that seem like someone failed to do part of their job. We take the easy road and commit to doing things differently next time. We commit to remember. It's quick and easy and gets the meeting moving onto more important topics.

What is important, is to not let people set themselves up for failure, even on small, unimportant topics. That's why, even when it's awkward, we should push through and focus the conversation on solutions that will ensure we don't fail. In my experience, once we acknowledge our shortcomings without judgment, and talk about processes and tools that can support us, we get better outcomes. Instead of talking about how we failed and what we should do differently, we're talking about what systems will help us do better. It carries less blame and bruises fewer egos, allowing everyone to focus on a solution rather than dwell on problems.

What ended up happening

Coming back to my handover issue, after I refocused the conversation, my team came up with a great solution. The idea was to add a mandatory field to our holiday booking form that asks us to paste a google calendar link to the handover meeting we've organized. We don't know that it's the best way to do it but it certainly is more reliable than our memory.

After introducing the idea that in retrospectives, we should look for system or process changes, I was proud to see team members question issue resolutions and find systematic solutions.