The Hidden Costs of Agile Anti-Patterns in Team Collaboration

Retrospectives were meant to be agile’s secret weapon.

In theory, they’re a dedicated space for teams to pause, reflect, and course-correct. A recurring moment of clarity in the blur of sprints. But in practice?

“We show up, we talk about the same problems, we say we’ll fix them... and then we don’t.”
- Jaclyn Smith, Senior Product Manager, Easy Agile

This isn’t just dysfunction. It’s disillusionment. And it’s costing agile teams more than they realise.

In this post, we dive into the hard truths explored by Jaclyn Smith, Senior Product Manager at Easy Agile, and Shane Raubenheimer, Agile Technical Consultant at Adaptavist in:

• 🎙️ Easy Agile Podcast Ep. 32: Why Retrospectives Fail & How to Fix Them
• 🎥 Webinar: Retro Action – Stop Talking, Start Doing
• 📝 The Action-Driven Retrospective Template

Our goal is not just to fix retrospectives, but to reclaim them. If that resonates with you, keep reading.

TL;DR:

• Retrospectives often fail because teams repeat surface-level issues without resolving root causes.
• Action items from retros are rarely followed up, leading to distrust and disengagement.
• The Action-Driven Retrospective Template helps teams focus on fewer, more impactful changes.
• Trust is rebuilt through consistency, accountability, and small wins that compound.
• Real improvement happens not during the retro, but in what the team does afterward.

When we stop believing that change is possible

The quiet failure of retrospectives doesn’t happen in a moment. It happens gradually, invisibly, over the course of sprints where insights are voiced but not acted on. When teams invest time in talking about problems, only to see them persist, they don’t just lose momentum. They lose hope.

In the podcast, Jaclyn Smith, Senior PM at Easy Agile, reflected on retros where participation seemed high, yet nothing stuck:

“We’d have these beautiful, well-facilitated boards. But when we checked in a sprint later, people couldn’t remember what the actions were. Or worse, they remembered, and knew nothing had happened.”

That erosion of trust isn’t always visible. But it’s felt. It manifests as disengagement, short answers, vague observations. When a team feels like retros won’t lead anywhere, they stop offering anything worth leading with.

This is the paradox of failed retros: the form persists, even as its function evaporates. The team is technically “doing the retro.” But the retro no longer does anything for the team.

Normalising dysfunction and agile anti-patterns

In the webinar, Shane and Jaclyn dissect this disillusionment based on their experience of working with hundreds of real teams across industries. Most teams can relate to this problem - they're doing everything “right”: regular standups, retrospectives on the calendar, a backlog that moves. And yet, they somehow feel stuck in the same spot.

That's because of one or more of these anti-patterns, which have become dangerously common:

• Cargo cult agile: Following agile rituals without purpose
• Hero culture: Over-reliance on a few individuals rather than teamwork
• Water-Scrum-Fall: Mixing methodologies without clear boundaries
• Team velocity misuse: Tracking productivity by team velocity alone
• Backlog noise: Long lists of tasks lacking customer value

The issue isn’t awareness. Teams know these patterns exist. What’s missing is a structure that interrupts them - consistently, visibly, and meaningfully.

“The worst retros aren’t chaotic. They’re quiet. No conflict. No depth. Just a board full of things we’ve already said.”
- Shane Raubenheimer, Agile Technical Consultant, Adaptavist

This is why retros don’t just need better facilitation. They need a redesigned relationship with action.

Building action into the ritual

The most fundamental problem Jaclyn and Shane identify is that retros end with “next steps”, but those steps never reappear. Actions get lost in Jira, or exist solely in a facilitator’s notes. They’re rarely revisited. They aren’t owned. And without ownership, there’s no accountability.

That’s why they created the Action-Driven Retrospective Template. It’s not flashy. But it forces a shift in rhythm:

• Every retro begins with last sprint’s actions. Were they completed? What impact did they have?
• Themes are not just grouped - they’re challenged. Why do they keep showing up? What’s beneath them?
• One or two actions are selected - no more. And they are immediately assigned, tracked, and made visible.

“This is about restoring integrity to the retro. If we’re not checking what we did last time, what does it say about what we’ll do this time?”
- Jaclyn Smith

The brilliance here is in the restraint. Rather than generate more insight, the template helps teams create follow-through - the most precious and elusive outcome of any retrospective.

Why teams need fewer actions and more outcomes

In agile culture, it’s easy to mistake motion for progress. A retro that generates 15 sticky notes and 5 action items might feel productive. But it often leads to diffusion of focus and quiet inaction.

Shane is blunt about this:

“I’d rather a team act on one thing really well, than half-act on five.”

The Action-Driven approach discourages long lists. It nudges teams to choose actions that are both impactful and doable within a sprint. It acknowledges capacity. It invites discernment. And in doing so, it cultivates trust.

Because when teams start seeing change happen, even in small ways, they begin to believe again. And belief, more than any tool or process, is what fuels sustainable agility.

Retrospectives as emotional reset, not just process audit

Perhaps the most refreshing part of the conversation was how emotionally honest it was. Neither Shane nor Jaclyn treated retrospectives as an abstract exercise. For them, it’s about what people feel when they leave the room.

“A retro should give people energy. It should help them see that we’re improving, that their voice matters, that something got better because of something they said.”
- Jaclyn Smith

This is what most guides miss. Retros aren’t just functional. They’re relational. They tell a story about whether the team can learn, grow, and improve together. When that story breaks, when people stop feeling heard, or stop seeing results, the damage goes beyond a missed task.

It touches morale. Culture. Confidence.

Tooling and rituals are not the answers, but the amplifiers

In the webinar, Jaclyn goes on to show how Easy Agile TeamRhythm can help teams carry retro actions directly into Jira workflows. It’s not about selling a tool, but rather about shortening the distance between reflection and execution.

Jaclyn’s point is clear:

“The retro isn’t where change happens. It’s where it begins. The real test is whether your sprint backlog tells the same story.”

This is where tooling earns its place - not by replacing conversations, but by preserving context and sustaining visibility. When actions from a retro are visible in the planning session, on the board, and during standup, they don’t disappear. They become culture.

Start with mindset shift. Then build the habit.

What makes this approach so effective is its humility. It doesn’t promise transformation. It promises traction.

Start with one action. Make it visible. Talk about it next time. Build a habit. Trust the compounding effect of small, completed improvements.

“Agile isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what matters - better, and more often.”
- Shane Raubenheimer

If your retrospectives feel tired, you don’t need a new format. You need a new relationship to action.

And that begins not with a workshop, but with a single, honest question:

“What did we change last sprint, and did it make anything better?”

If you don’t know the answer, start here:

📝 Download the Action-Driven Retrospective Template
🎧 Listen to the full podcast
🎥 Watch the full webinar

You don’t need to fix everything this sprint.

You just need to prove, to your team, and to yourself, that change is possible again.

The seventh principle of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is:
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Not story points, not velocity, not estimates: working software.

Jason Godesky, Better Programming

Estimation is a common challenge for agile software development teams. The anticipated size and complexity of a task is anything but objective; what is simple for one person may not be for another. Story points have become the go-to measure to estimate the effort involved in completing a task, and are often used to gauge performance. But is there real value in that, and what are the risks of relying too heavily on velocity as a guide?

Agile estimation

As humans, we are generally terrible at accurately measuring big things in units like time, distance, or in this case, complexity. However, we are great at making relative comparisons - we can tell if something is bigger, smaller, or the same size as something else. This is where story points come in. Story points are a way to estimate relative effort for a task. They are not objective and can fluctuate depending on the team's experience and shared reference points. However, the longer a team works together, the more effective they become at relative sizing.

The teams that I coach have all experienced challenges with user story estimation. The historical data tells us that once a story exceeds 5 story-points, the variability in delivery expands. Typically, the more the estimate exceeds 5 points, the more the delivery varies from the estimate.

Robin D Bailey, Agile Coach, GoSourcing

Scale of reference

While story points are useful as an abstraction for planning and estimating, they should not be over-analyzed. In a newly formed team, story points are likely to fluctuate significantly, but there can be more confidence in the reliability of estimations in a long-running team who have completed many releases together. Two different teams, however, will have different scales of reference.

At a company level, the main value I used to seek with story points was to understand any systemic problems. For example, back when Atlassian released to Server quarterly, the sprints before a release would blow out and fail to meet the usual level of story point completion. The root cause turned out to be a massive spike in critical bugs uncovered by quality blitz testing. By performing better testing earlier and more regularly we spread the load and also helped to de-risk the releases. It sounds simple looking back but it was new knowledge for our teams at the time that needed to be uncovered.

Mat Lawrence, COO, Easy Agile

Even with well-established teams, velocity can be affected by factors like heightened complexity with dependencies scheduled together, or even just the average number of story points per ticket. If a team has scheduled a lot of low-complexity tickets, their process might not handle the throughput required. Alternatively having fewer high-complexity tickets could drastically increase the effort required by other team members to review the work. Either situation could affect velocity, but both represent bottlenecks.

Any measured change in velocity could be due to a number of other factors, like capacity shifting through changes in headcount with team members being absent due to illness or planned leave. The reality is that the environment is rarely sterile and controlled.

Relative velocity

Many organizations may feel tempted to report on story points, and velocity reports are readily available in Jira. Still, they should be viewed with caution if they’re being used in a ‘team of teams’ context such as across an Agile Release Train. The different scales of reference across teams can make story points meaningless; what one team considers to be a 8-point task may be a 3-point task for another.

To many managers, the existence of an estimate implies the existence of an “actual”, and means that you should compare estimates to actuals, and make sure that estimates and actuals match up. When they don’t, that means people should learn to estimate better.

So if the existence of an estimate causes management to take their eye off the ball of value and instead focus on improving estimates, it takes attention from the central purpose, which is to deliver real value quickly.

‍Ron Jefferies
Co-Author of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Story Points Revisited

Seeking value

However, story points are still a valuable tool when used appropriately. Reporting story points to the team using them and providing insights into their unique trends could help them gain more self-awareness and avoid common pitfalls. Teams who are seeking to improve how they’re working may wish to monitor their velocity over time as they implement new strategies.

Certainly, teams working together over an extended period will come to a shared understanding of what a 3 story point task feels like to them. And there is value in the discussion and exploration that is needed to get to that point of shared understanding. The case for 8 story points as opposed to 3 may reveal a complexity that had not been considered, or it may reveal a new perspective that helps the work be broken down more effectively. It could also question whether the work is worth pursuing at all, and highlight that a new approach is needed.

The value of story points for me (as a Developer and a Founder) is the conversations where the issue is discussed by people with diverse perspectives. Velocity is only relatively accurate in long-run teams with high retention.

Dave Elkan, Co-CEO, Easy Agile

At a company level, story points can be used to understand systemic problems by monitoring trends over time. While this reporting might not provide an objective measure, it can provide insights into progress across an Agile Release Train. However, using story point completion as a measure of individual or team performance should be viewed with considerable caution.

Story points are a useful estimation tool for comparing relative effort, but they depend on shared points of reference, and different teams will have different scales. Even established teams may notice velocity changes over time. For this reason, and while velocity reporting can provide insights into the team's progress, it must be remembered that story points were designed for an estimation of effort, rather than a measure. And at the end of the day, we’re in the business of producing great software, not great estimates.

Looking to focus your team on improvement? Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps you turn insights into action with team retrospectives linked to your agile board in Jira, to improve your ways of working and make your next release better than the last. Turn an action item into a Jira issue in just a few clicks, then schedule the work on the user story map to ensure your ideas aren’t lost at the end of the retrospective.

Many thanks to Satvik Sharma, John Folder, Mat Lawrence, Dave Elkan, Henri Seymour, and Robin D Bailey for contributing their expertise and experience to this article.

Being agile vs doing agile – what’s the difference?

Organizations around the world have recognized the need to respond rapidly to meet the challenges of constant change. As a result, they’re racing to adopt agile ways of working, with the pandemic accelerating agile adoption.

Those who get it right can make a powerful impact on their bottom line and their competitive edge. But for others, the benefits may yet to be seen.

This is where ‘doing agile’ versus ‘being agile’ can make all the difference. Because to truly reap the benefits of agile methodology, organizations need to shift from doing to being.

This article will explain the difference between being agile vs doing agile. Plus, we’ll take you through some of the common challenges many organizations face in their agile journey.

Key points

• To realize the full potential of agile ways of working, teams must cultivate an agile mindset as well as adopt agile processes.
• Moving from ‘doing agile’ to ‘being agile’ takes time, coaching, and a new approach to management.
• Done right, being agile can amplify customer satisfaction, employee engagement, growth, and profitability.

Why agile, and why now?

Agile had already been rising in popularity for over 20 years, but once the pandemic hit, this growth accelerated.

Across every industry, being able to deliver digital experiences is now crucial. Organizations now need to act and think like software companies, with a laser focus on the customer’s online experience. Together with an active approach to finding customers, you need to deliver real value to stand out from competitors.

For organizations looking to survive - and thrive - in this environment, many are turning to agile frameworks to rapidly add customer value and drive business results. Being agile allows teams to:

• Make the complex simple – by working within a clear, structured framework, chaos turns to order.
• Maintain a clear overview – agile teams have a shared understanding of their progress towards their goals.
• Replicate success – if a team finds an effective way to deliver results, they can repurpose and share solutions across the organization.
• Create an aligned, purposeful culture – when hundreds of people across one organization form dozens of agile teams, they build a stable backbone, walking the same path towards the same goal.

"Agile organizations, viewed as living systems, have evolved to thrive in an unpredictable, rapidly changing environment. These organizations are both stable and dynamic. They focus on customers, fluidly adapt to environmental changes, and are open, inclusive, and nonhierarchical; they evolve continually and embrace uncertainty and ambiguity. Such organizations, we believe, are far better equiped than traditional ones for future."

- McKinsey & Company

What does it mean to be agile?

Many organizations incorporate a few agile processes to manage projects. But that doesn’t mean teams have fully understood and embraced the agile methodology. It could be that they’re ‘doing agile’ rather than actually ‘being agile’.

Here’s the difference between the two:

Doing agile

‘Doing agile’ is the misconception that if you do agile things your company will become agile and responsive to change. Organizations that have fallen into this trap may go through the motions of some agile processes, such as daily stand-ups, sprints, and retrospectives. Teams are structured to be small, cross-functional, and collaborative. But by stopping there, those teams don’t become truly agile and they may struggle to see results.

While agile ceremonies, tools, and structures are critical in implementation, they are only part of what makes an organization agile.

Being agile

‘Being agile’ means you incorporate the above activities but go beyond the processes. This means applying an agile mindset and agile values to all areas of the organization. Teams will need training to master the agile mindset and push through any challenges along the way. It takes more time and effort than simply doing agile, but it’s critical if you want to reap the benefits.

What’s an agile mindset?

Embracing an agile mindset means understanding and living its four core values. To be agile, you need to:

1. Respect people - Recognize that people are critical to the success of your organization. Ensure people share common goals, feel safe and empowered to share ideas, and adopt a ‘we’ versus ‘I’ mentality.
2. Optimize flow - Build in quality at each increment so you can identify issues and course-correct early. This helps maximize value and minimize waste while creating a consistent, sustainable flow of work.
3. Encourage innovation - Foster experimentation with collaboration, constructive feedback, and autonomy. Schedule time and space for creativity and ideas to flow.
4. Relentlessly improve - Keep in mind that there is no endpoint with the agile mindset. It’s about continuous improvement, so you need to continually reflect and improve future processes as part of an ongoing practice.

To take these values and make them the foundation of working across your organization, you need to combine agile processes with an agile mindset. Without the agile mindset, you’re not ‘being agile’, and your processes won’t deliver your organization’s full potential.

"The agile mindset is a thought process that involves undersatdning, collaborating, learning, and staying flexible to achieve high-performing results. By combining the agile mindset with processes and tools, team can adapt to change and deliver incremental value to their customers."

- Atlassian

Agile processes and tools aren’t enough

Agile processes, including the ceremonies, tools, and apps, are there to support the mindset of the team. But without getting the mindset right across your organization, you won’t be truly agile.

Fostering the agile mindset gives an organization the ability to rapidly move in any given direction at any given time to deliver the best value to customers. Teams who’ve mastered agile are usually:

• Autonomous and empowered to make decisions around the product and customer experience.
• Able to adapt to change quickly.
• Always willing to learn something new.

Engaged with a shared purpose and collaborative culture.

"It's about being able to pivot to change. Whether that's in terms of people, or resources or budget - whatever that looks like for an organization. If you're able to quickly shift from one area of focus to another before your competitor does, then you have a competitive advantage in the market."

- Sean Blake, Head of Marketing, Easy Agile

Common challenges to look out for as you move from doing agile to being agile

The sooner you can act and move from doing agile towards being agile, the sooner your customers, employees, and your bottom line will benefit.

Here are a few common challenges and tips to overcome them.

• People might hold onto old habits
  People find change hard, especially when habits are ingrained. You might find some people dig their heels in, clinging to the old way of doing things. It’s important to remember it can take time, and people will need support to learn new ways of working. Be sure to bring in plenty of opportunities for feedback and discussion so you can reiterate as a team to find a process that works for your organization.
• It’s not just the team who needs to be coached
  Being agile is a mindset for the entire organization, including managers and executives. If your leaders don’t understand and support agile, it will be hard to get traction and shift old processes and hierarchies. Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches need to spend time coaching leaders to develop new agile mindsets and capabilities.
• For many organizations, being agile requires a new style of management
  The traditional command-and-control management style may have worked in the industrial age. But now it’s a mismatch for the way organizations and people need to work today, and it doesn’t support the agile mindset. To be agile, teams need the trust, autonomy, and ability to take an idea through to execution without any roadblocks. Senior executives must get behind this multifaceted cultural-transformation effort for this to happen.

Are you ready to be agile?

Moving beyond agile processes to scale an agile mindset across an organization isn’t something you can tackle overnight. It takes time, effort, training, and leadership support to internalize agile values and move beyond the command mindset of the past.

You may face challenges along the way, you’ll discover there’s always more to learn, and you must be agile in your adoption of agile.

But the prize for true agility is significant, including increasing customer satisfaction, boosting employee engagement, and improving productivity - making it well worth the investment.

Agility helps modern organizations thrive through change in an uncertain and unpredictable world. For most of us, it’s no longer a desirable way of working - it’s essential.