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Five of Cups
"The Failed Retro"
Cups · People & Team▲ Upright 0
The retro that actually hurt. Someone named the real problem — the on-call rotation is unfair, the tech lead is a bottleneck, the deadline was set without consulting the team. Five of Cups upright is the necessary grief of acknowledging what went wrong. It stings, but the two cups still standing behind you are the people who stayed honest.
▽ Reversed 0
The retro where everyone wrote 'communication' on a sticky note, nodded solemnly, and changed absolutely nothing. Five of Cups reversed is performative reflection — the team going through the motions of learning without any intention of doing anything differently. Same incident, same root cause, new Jira ticket number.