Agile Theatre glossary: four coined failure modes

Definitions of the four terms coined in the Agile Theatre field guide: estimate laundering, feedback banking, velocity ratchet, and the retro-as-pressure-valve. The canonical, citable source for each.

Four names for four ways a ceremony gets captured. We coined them because the failures were common enough to deserve nouns, and nobody had named them cleanly. Use them, cite them, and — ideally — never need them.

Estimate laundering

An estimate quietly converted into a commitment or deadline, then held against the team.

An estimate is a guess made with the least information you’ll ever have about a piece of work. A commitment is a promise. Estimate laundering is the trick of treating the first as if it were the second: the guess goes into the planning meeting, a deadline comes out, and when the deadline slips it’s recorded as the developer’s failure to hit “their” number. The tell is the missing conversation — nobody ever said the words “we are now committing to this date,” so the team is bound by a promise it never actually made.

Failure mode: Power. Go deeper: story points vs hours and Mike Cohn on separating estimating from committing.

Feedback banking

Honest retrospective input stored up and withdrawn against you at review time.

The retrospective is sold as a safe place to be candid. Feedback banking is the discovery that candor has a settlement date — that a frustration you named in a retro can resurface months later in a performance review, a bonus calibration, or a quiet conversation about “fit.” It doesn’t require a villain; the mere presence of someone who signs off on promotions is enough to teach a team that the safe move is to perform contentment. A retro where honesty is a career risk isn’t a safe retro, and it’s why anonymity, manager-exclusion and the Vegas rule exist at all.

Failure mode: Power. Go deeper: how to build a psychologically safe space.

Velocity ratchet

Velocity treated as an ever-rising productivity target, so teams inflate to keep up.

Velocity is meant to be a team’s private forecasting input — the rolling average of points completed, used to project how long a backlog will take. The velocity ratchet is what happens when it escapes the room as a performance metric: last sprint’s number becomes this sprint’s floor, and the only permitted direction is up. Teams respond the only way the incentive allows — a story that was a 3 becomes a 5 — so the number climbs while nothing ships faster. Even the pro-points authorities warn that any hint of cross-team comparison produces exactly this inflation.

Failure mode: Power. Go deeper: velocity and the DORA metrics on why velocity isn’t a delivery measure.

Pressure valve (retro-as-)

A retro that lets people vent so leadership feels heard, with no power to change the causes.

When the problems that actually matter — budget, headcount, dependencies, decisions made two levels up — are outside the team’s authority, the retrospective can name them but not fix them. It becomes a pressure valve: the team gets to speak precisely so that nothing has to change, releasing just enough steam to give leadership an excuse not to act. The antidote is a radiator, not a valve — triage each issue by who owns it, escalate the red ones upward by name and date, and keep them visible until someone with the power to fix them does.

Failure mode: Void. Go deeper: the follow-through void, why retrospectives fail, and Agile Retrospectives (2nd ed) on Circles & Soup and Retrospective Radiators.

Frequently asked questions

Are these official agile terms?

No. We coined them in this field guide. They aren’t in the Scrum Guide or the standard texts — we named them because the failure modes are common enough to deserve nouns and nobody had named them cleanly. The underlying failures are thoroughly documented; the labels are ours, and you’re welcome to use and cite them.

What’s the difference between velocity ratchet and estimate laundering?

Both are Power-mode distortions of estimation, but they act on different numbers. The velocity ratchet turns a team’s private pace metric into an ever-rising target, so teams inflate points to keep up. Estimate laundering converts a single up-front guess into a commitment and then holds the team to it. One weaponises the trend; the other weaponises the individual estimate.