A malfunctioning team ceremony

When a standup or retro stops working, the instinct is to change or cut it.

May 19, 2026

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When a standup or retro stops working, the instinct is to change or cut it. This article looks at why that rarely helps, and how to diagnose the underlying condition a ceremony might be exposing.

Most engineering managers have sat through a standup that was clearly a waste of time. Nobody raised their actual blockers, updates sounded performative, and the meeting somehow felt both rushed and pointless at the same time.

The natural reaction is to assume the meeting itself is broken.

So the team experiments. Maybe the standup becomes async. Maybe it moves to twice a week. Maybe the retro gets shortened. Maybe somebody decides the team has “too many ceremonies” and starts deleting them.

I’ve done versions of all of that before.

Most of the time, it did not solve the actual problem. It just moved the problem somewhere less visible.

A malfunctioning ceremony is usually not the disease. It’s the symptom. The standup, retro, or planning session is exposing a condition underneath the team, and changing the format often only changes where you notice the condition.

If your team avoids surfacing blockers in standup, they’ll usually avoid surfacing them in Slack too. If ownership feels unclear during planning, ownership is probably unclear in the actual work. If nobody disagrees openly during retro, removing the retro does not suddenly create trust.

You haven’t fixed the underlying condition. You’ve mostly hidden the readout.

Ceremonies are not only coordination tools. One of their biggest values is that they make the state of a team visible. A good standup tells you whether ownership is clear. A good retro tells you whether people feel safe disagreeing. A good planning session tells you whether the team actually understands its priorities.

When you remove a ceremony without understanding what it’s exposing, you often lose visibility of the problem itself.

A ceremony reflects the condition of the team

A few years ago, I inherited a team with a standup everybody disliked. It was way too long, nobody seemed engaged, and half the meeting was people struggling to remember what they did yesterday. So I did what felt sensible at the time and replaced the meeting with written Slack updates.

At first, it looked like a huge improvement. Engineers got time back, nobody had to context-switch first thing in the morning, and the updates looked cleaner and more efficient.

Then the written updates became shorter. Then vaguer. “Still working on it” “Making progress” “Almost done”. One engineer stayed blocked on an auth migration for over a week because nobody, including me, registered that “still working on it” had turned into “I’m stuck” but was scared to say it.

The standup had not been the problem.

The standup had been the thing showing me there was a problem.

Once I removed it, the issue did not disappear. I just stopped seeing it clearly enough to react early.

That distinction matters a lot because managers often treat ceremonies like levers. If the standup feels bad, change the standup. If retro feels awkward, redesign retro. But ceremonies usually do not create team health. They expose the current state of the system underneath them.

Will Larson has a good point about organizational change that maps directly onto this. Teams pay a real cost every time you change how they operate. If you kill standup, replace it with async updates, then reintroduce meetings three months later because the async version failed, you’ve paid the change cost multiple times without ever addressing the underlying issue.

Most problems inside organizations come from the system itself rather than the individuals inside it.

When a ceremony consistently breaks down, the cause is usually structural. Maybe ownership is unclear. Maybe the team is too large. Maybe priorities change constantly. Maybe people don’t feel safe admitting they’re stuck. Maybe the work itself is so tangled that coordination naturally becomes painful.

Changing the meeting format rarely fixes those conditions.

I wrote before about systems thinking for engineering managers. Instead of asking “how do I improve this meeting” ask “what does this meeting keep telling me about the team?”

That question usually leads somewhere much more useful.

What broken ceremonies usually signal

Once you start looking at ceremonies this way, certain patterns become hard to unsee.

One of the most common is the standup where nobody surfaces a real blocker. Everybody says they’re “fine” but work is obviously moving slower than it should. Deadlines slip, problems appear late, and people seem to discover dependencies at the last possible moment.

Most of the time, that’s not a meeting-format issue.

Admitting you’re stuck feels socially expensive, so people avoid doing it publicly. A 2025 study in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology found that standups strongly relate to psychological safety, and through that to team performance. A standup where nobody admits blockers usually does not mean the team is healthy. It usually means the team does not feel safe exposing uncertainty.

Another common pattern is when everybody talks to the engineering or product manager instead of to each other. The meeting turns into a model where every update routes through one person. Engineers wait for the manager’s reaction before moving on, and discussions rarely happen naturally between teammates.

That usually means that the team sees the manager as the center of coordination instead of the work itself being the center.

The ceremony is exposing the shape of the organization.

Another useful signal is the meeting that constantly spills into “let’s take that offline”. Once or twice is normal, but if that happens a lot it means that people no longer match the dependency graph of the work. Maybe the team became too large. Maybe it’s really two teams pretending to be one. Maybe ownership boundaries stopped making sense but nobody revisited them.

The important point is that none of those conditions gets fixed simply by changing the meeting itself.

Low trust does not disappear because standup moved to Slack.

Unclear ownership does not disappear because updates became async.

A badly shaped team does not become healthy because retros now happen every other Friday instead of weekly.

The meeting is just exposing the condition.

This is the same pattern I see in defensive communication inside teams. When somebody answers a simple question with three paragraphs of explanation, the length is not the actual problem. The communication style is signalling something underneath it.

Ceremonies work the same way. Read the signal, not only the surface behavior.

Sometimes the meeting genuinely is bad

That said, I do think managers can overcomplicate this idea too.

Sometimes the ceremony genuinely is just poorly designed.

A standup scheduled at 9 a.m. for a team split across London and San Francisco is failing because the timing is terrible, not because there’s some deep trust issue hiding underneath it. A retro with twenty-five people in it might simply be too large to function properly. A planning session without an agenda will usually feel chaotic because the structure itself is chaotic.

Those are real mechanical problems and they should be fixed.

The important thing is distinguishing between a mechanical issue and a structural one. If the problem disappears once you fix the timing, attendee list, or format, then great. Don’t invent deeper organizational meaning that isn’t there.

But if the same patterns keep reappearing after multiple ceremony redesigns, there’s a good chance the ceremony is exposing something more fundamental about how the team operates.

There’s also an important nuance here. The DORA research behind Accelerate argues that changing how teams work can shape culture itself. In other words, behavior can influence mindset, not only reflect it.

I think that’s true.

A well-designed ceremony absolutely can improve communication patterns over time. But the teams that successfully changed their rituals usually changed the surrounding system too. Teams that successfully move toward async work usually strengthen documentation quality, ownership clarity, and written communication expectations at the same time.

The format change works because the environment around it changed too.

Deleting a ceremony to avoid discomfort is very different from redesigning a ceremony to improve how the team operates.

So when a ceremony starts feeling dysfunctional, the sequence I usually follow is fairly simple. First, describe the exact behavior you’re seeing instead of saying “the meeting feels bad”. Then check whether there’s a simple mechanical fix. If not, ask what condition underneath the meeting could realistically be creating the behavior. Only after that do I think about redesigning the format itself.

And when the format does change, it should apply pressure to the real issue underneath it rather than simply hiding the symptom.

If everybody reports upward to the manager, don’t just tell people to “collaborate more”. Change the meeting structure so the discussion follows the work itself instead of the individuals. If people avoid admitting blockers, the real work probably lives outside the ceremony entirely, in your 1:1s, in how you respond when somebody admits uncertainty, and in whether the team has learned that exposing problems is safe.

Those changes take much longer than redesigning a standup.

But they’re usually the thing that actually matters.

The discomfort is useful

The reason broken ceremonies feel so frustrating is because they expose things teams would often rather hide.

A standup where nobody admits they’re blocked reveals a lack of trust. A retro where nobody disagrees reveals low psychological safety. A planning session where priorities constantly change reveals instability higher up the organization.

That discomfort is useful information.

So before you stop a ceremony entirely, it’s worth asking yourself what visibility disappears with it. If the answer is “nothing, the format itself is just mechanically bad” then change it without guilt.

But if the answer is “I’ll stop seeing that the team doesn’t really trust each other” then the ceremony was never the thing that needed fixing.

It was the thing trying to show you what to fix.

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