In fact, all agile needs is good retrospectives, and all the rest you can decide there.
In that case get the two others with you and decide a new rule: nobody leaves the retrospective before they've spoken.
Warning: might backfire, one team I worked with scheduled meetings right before lunch so they wouldn't stretch out.
It backfired: these meetings continued into our lunch every single time until I think I or someone else started just walking out as lunch started.
More likely you have people who are paid to do some workload which they are generally happy with. They aren't going to be motivated into doing more by accident, especially through their own action. This is the vast majority of people in the world, so good luck countering that momentum over the long term.
Effective software project management is an interesting and hard problem, granted, so many people are interested in how to tackle it. I get it.
What I see is that "agile" criticisms are really criticisms of it's inefficacy in giving employers more for their dollar from the employee perspective. I don't see why I should get too invested in minimizing my relative value.
If you have a bunch of people who are just doing the minimum they’re paid to do, with no passion and excitement for the work itself or their team, you either need a different method or different people.
It’s like shaping a system of people. I think of it as 50% of the development endeavor at larger shops.
Retros are used to identify ”technical organization debt” starting to build up, in a way.
[0] A couple of said theory tweets, from memory
Side note: I have never actually read anything written by Mao before. That stuff is a very unsettling combination of stone-cold and unhinged. Maybe it's just because we know the "full" history now, maybe it's just the phrasing of the translation. Yikes.
And here lies the difference: agile includes retrospectives. I It's the only thing you need for agile. And if you don't have that, you don't have agile.
It was refreshing to hear their take on project managers, as it matches how I’ve been feeling recently. They schedule 7 checkpoint meetings per week and I’ve given up on attending, I just can’t do it anymore.
I hope that we can move past agile into a new world that is free of the baggage and process of yesteryear. Even if the core principles are the same, let’s call it something different so we can start fresh and impress upper management.