Talking about RECENCY BIAS

 

23.02.2025

I have been fortunate to have blood brothers on this earth that propel me in my career journey. 

A very recent conversation sparked this article. 

Calling me on Facetime on his way back during lunch - So have you heard about Recency Bias? And what do you do about it in your team Retros? 

Recency what? I'm not sure I hear you right. What are you talking about? 

It's a whole thing. You dont know? 

Apparently not. Explain to me please. 

Well, it's when a team discusses something that didn't go well recently but they talk about it like it's a whole big deal. 

Oh that? Sure I have been splashed in that pretty well. Infact, I'm guilty of it. 

It happened to me, until the Devs helped me realise and we have been able to move on and it's no more a deviator in our Retros. 

So WHAT DID WE DO? Did those things WORK? Sure did! Infact it's a couple of things a teamcan do in such scenarios. 

Check the FREQUENCY of the scenario 

1. Someone who realises it's happening (thank heavens for that person), raises their hand and interrupts the discussion saying - Hey, Let's take a step a back and check how often this scenario happened over the past Quarter, Past 3 Quarters. 

Pro Tip: Have a metric to help you support your approximate guess to show the real frequency. How often did it happen?. If it occured only in the previous iteration after a very long time, then it's likely not a burning item to storm, weigh and resolve (unless it broke something major on Production and obviously needs to be fixed immediately)

Weigh it's MAGNITUDE

2. What was the impact of this scenario? Were there any consequences? 
3. What other services, components were affected by it? 

How LOW are the fruits hanging? 

1. This is a favorite one by the PO. What's the effort to resolve this so it doesn't happen again? 

Rate it. Present it. Make it visible. 

Making it visible by presenting it on a scale from lowest to highest makes it all the more visible than just talking about it on a call. Gotta trust me on this! 

Ask the team to rate the frequency, magnitude and effort on separate scales below each other (Miro is a great tool to do this btw) to present you a picture. 

This will help you make a good decision as a team, on how to move forward with this specific scenario. 

Drop it - it happened just once in 10 months and the impact was negligible and the effort to fix it is not worth the time invested in it

Watch it - observe it for a period of time to see if it occurs again

Fix it now - Create a ticket/s to fix it in the upcoming iteration

Fix it later  - Create a ticket/s to fix it during low time like summer or Christmas. 

Occasionally you might also come across a situation where you have tasks for short term fix and some tasks that belong to the long term fix. We've done this in our teams and it works pretty well. 

There you have it. That's recency bias. It reminds me of the exercises my running coach mentions and I have no clue what it is coz I've never heard the term. Later I look it up on youtube and turns out, I have been doing this since a few months every Monday in my Core workout but didn't know it was called Bird Dog. Definitely google that. It's a fun exercise for a good core. 

Until then, happy navigating your recency bias. Now that you're aware, you'll be the one interrupting the rest to make a good call on it.