Everyone does standups. Most teams hate them, or tolerate them, or have quietly given up on them. Nobody seems to quite agree what they’re for.
We debate the format endlessly. The classic three questions, a simple “are you on track” or walk the board? But arguably, the format isn’t the problem.
The problem is that most standups are accountability mechanisms dressed up as coordination mechanisms.
What matters is whether the people in the room are talking to each other about the work, or reporting at a facilitator about their individual tasks. One of those is coordination. The other is a status meeting with good PR.
The acid test should be: does anyone know something, or plan to do something differently, because of this conversation? If the honest answer is usually no, a change in format won’t save you.
If you cancelled your standup tomorrow, would your team’s coordination actually get worse? If the answer is “probably not much”, that’s not an argument for cancelling it. It’s a diagnosis.
The real question is not “how should we run our standup?” but “do we actually know what it’s for?”