Originally sparked by a Reddit thread with dozens of real stories. This is a reflection — not a rulebook.

Can a team work without retrospectives?
Yes. I’ve seen it. And it can be fine — even great — if the team is mature enough to reflect and adapt on their own.

Some of the best teams I’ve worked with didn’t hold formal retros. They didn’t need a calendar slot to ask “What’s not working?” — they just talked. At lunch. In Slack. After standup. No ceremony. Just awareness.

They also didn’t resist retros when we did run one. No eyerolls, no pushback. It was just another tool — use it when useful, skip it when not.

But here’s the catch.
If you remove the ritual entirely, it becomes harder to notice when the principle starts slipping. No shared pause. No structured reflection. You don’t always see that something’s off — until it breaks.

So yeah — you can skip the retro. But do it mindfully. Do it with eyes open.

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Now for the hard part.

Some teams don’t just skip retros — they actively resist them.
And not because they’re too good for them — but because they’ve stopped believing.

Here’s what I read between the lines of that discussion:
"Managers do what they want anyway."
"Nothing ever changes."
"It’s just a performance."

That’s not about meetings anymore.
That’s about trust. Or rather — the lack of it.

The most painful insight from that thread was this: the retro didn’t fail because it was boring. It failed because the team stopped believing it could lead to change.

And that’s a much deeper issue.
It points to disconnect — between team and leadership, between words and actions, between ritual and reality.

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My takeaway?

The retro is not sacred. The why behind it is.

If your team resists retros — don’t start with a better format.
Start by asking: why did they stop believing?

Fix that — and the retro will come back naturally. Or maybe not.
But the reflection will. And that’s what actually matters.

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Written by Ilya Komakhin