The Follow-Through Index: do agile teams do what they decide?

Ask why retrospectives fail and someone will throw a statistic at you — some version of “only about a third of retro action items ever get done.” It’s everywhere. It’s sourced nowhere. Nobody actually knows the number.

We do. TeamRetro runs enough retrospectives to measure the one thing that decides whether the hour was worth it — do teams actually do what they decide? — from a sample of hundreds of thousands of real action items, not a survey and not a guess.

It’s not a third. It’s nearly three-quarters.

How do you make retrospective action items actually get done? Give every action a named owner and a due date before the meeting ends, review last retro’s open actions at the start of the next one, and track your completion rate over time. In our data, owned-and-dated actions complete about 90% of the time; unowned ones are closer to a coin toss.

The headline: about 73% of retro actions actually get done

Across a sample of hundreds of thousands of action items committed in real retrospectives, ~73% were completed. Not one in three — closer to three in four.

Before you frame it and hang it on the wall: this is a ceiling, not a national average. These are teams who care enough to run retros in a dedicated tool, so read it as what good looks like, not what everyone does. But it kills the folklore stone dead. “About a third” isn’t the truth about retrospectives — it’s the truth about retrospectives run without a rhythm and without owners. Which is exactly what the rest of the data is about.

Lever 1: cadence. Teams with a rhythm finish; teams without one don’t.

The biggest single split in the data is how regularly a team retrospects.

• Teams that retro on a regular cadence complete about three in four of their actions.
• Teams that retro only sporadically fall to around half — and the least-engaged, purely ad-hoc teams bottom out near four in ten.

Same tool, same features, opposite outcomes. And it isn’t only completion: sporadic teams take about twice as long to close what they do finish — a couple of months, versus roughly six weeks for teams with a rhythm. A retro isn’t a meeting; it’s a loop. Teams that keep the loop turning close the loop. Teams that don’t, don’t.

This is the uncomfortable one for the retros-are-theatre crowd: retros aren’t the problem. Irregular retros are.

Lever 2: ownership. An action without an owner is a wish.

Here’s the finding you can act on this afternoon. Actions given a named owner and a due date get completed about 90% of the time. Actions with neither sit far below that.

And yet teams barely use it. Only about 40% of actions get an owner at all, and just ~11% ever get a due date. That’s the gap — not effort, not intent, assignment. Most teams leave the retro with a list of good intentions and no names on it, then wonder why the list is still there next fortnight.

So the advice writes itself, and it’s the opposite of what most facilitators optimize for. Don’t leave with the longest list of things you could do. Leave with two that each have a name and a date. An action without an owner isn’t an action; it’s a wish the whole team has quietly agreed to ignore.

The myth-buster: retrospectives outrun their own actions

Now the finding that should change how you judge follow-through. When teams walk into their next retro, most of the last retro’s actions aren’t done yet — and that panics people. It shouldn’t.

Actions take about six weeks (median) to complete, and most teams retro faster than that. So the real shape of follow-through is roughly:

• ~1 in 4 actions done by the next retro,
• ~1 in 2 done — but after the next retro has already come and gone,
• ~1 in 4 never done at all.

Half of everything teams finish, they finish late by the retro’s clock — not because it was abandoned, but because it was still in flight when the calendar came around again. So “why isn’t last retro’s action done?” is usually the wrong question. The one to ask is whether it’s moving. Judge follow-through on a quarter’s rhythm, not a fortnight’s.

The last line of that list is the real void: about one in four actions are never completed — and they live overwhelmingly in the unowned, no-due-date, ad-hoc-cadence corner of the data. Everything above is how you climb out of it.

How we measured it

No survey, no self-report about self-report. These are events recorded in the product:

• Sample: a large sample of action items created in real retrospectives — type = action, explicitly accepted (not AI suggestions a facilitator dismissed) — across teams using TeamRetro, with demo and internal accounts removed. Hundreds of thousands of them — enough to be statistically robust across every segment we report.
• “Done” means an action was explicitly marked complete in-product, never inferred. We report completion “ever” and “by the next retro” separately, because the gap between them is the whole story.
• What we left out, and why. Agreements — a team’s standing working agreements (“disagree and commit”, “cameras on for demos”) — are deliberately excluded: they’re ongoing norms, not tasks you tick off, and counting them would understate follow-through. So are the ~2–3% of actions published to an external tracker (Jira, mostly): once an action lives in Jira its completion is managed there, not in TeamRetro, so we only measure what we can actually watch finish. Both exclusions are conservative.
• We report medians and distributions, not just averages — completion times are skewed, and a mean would flatter us.
• One thing we went looking for and didn’t find: any correlation between a team’s follow-through and its own health-check scores. There’s essentially none — following through is a discipline, not a mood, and you can’t read one off the other.

Honest limits. Teams who choose a dedicated retro tool almost certainly follow through more than average, so this is a ceiling, not a cross-industry mean. “Marked done” isn’t the same as “made a difference” — completion is the floor of impact, not proof of it. And some genuine agreements get mis-logged as actions (and never “complete”), which drags the measured rate down — so for real tasks, if anything, the true number is a shade higher.

Privacy

Every figure here is aggregate and de-identified — event counts across many teams, never a single customer’s data, never anyone’s name, never the text of an action. Segments are only reported above a minimum team/action threshold. Full guardrails live in the internal spec.

Cite this

Across a sample of hundreds of thousands of retrospective action items tracked in TeamRetro, about 73% were completed — roughly three in four, not the “one in three” of folklore. Completion rises to ~90% for actions given a named owner and a due date, and teams that retrospect on a regular cadence follow through far more than those who retro ad hoc. — The Follow-Through Index, TeamRetro (2026)

Using this in research or a talk? We’d love a link back.

Keep reading

• Why retrospectives fail (and how to make yours matter)
• The follow-through void — Agile Theatre
• Are retrospectives worth it? A verdict

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of retrospective action items actually get done?

About 73% — nearly three in four — across a sample of hundreds of thousands of action items tracked in TeamRetro. The widely repeated “about a third” is folklore: quoted everywhere, sourced nowhere. A third is roughly what you’d see from teams retrospecting without a regular cadence or clear ownership — not the ceiling teams reach with both.

How do you make retrospective actions actually happen?

Two things, in order. Retro on a regular cadence — teams with a rhythm finish far more than teams who retro ad hoc. And give every action a named owner and a due date — owned-and-dated actions complete about 90% of the time, yet only around a tenth of actions get a due date at all. Leaving with two owned actions beats leaving with ten unowned ones.

Why do actions from our last retro never seem done by the next one?

Because retrospectives outrun their own actions. Actions take about six weeks to complete on average, and most teams retro more often than that — so roughly half of what teams finish, they finish after the next retro has already happened. “Not done yet” usually means “still moving”, not “failed”. Worry about the action that isn’t moving, not the one that isn’t finished by the next meeting.

Are there tools that help retrospective action items get done?

Yes — a dedicated retrospective tool closes the loop a task list leaves open. TeamRetro, where this data comes from, lets you assign each action an owner and a due date in the meeting itself, keeps open actions visible at the next retro so they’re reviewed before anything new is added, and records completion so you can see your rate improve. Whichever tool you use, those are the mechanisms that move the number: ownership, visibility next retro, and a measured completion rate.