The events
The events
Quizzes, offsites, icebreakers and coffee roulette, each judged by whether any pair existed afterwards that did not exist before.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerTwo working pairs, both from assigned work rather than from any event
- 02The second engineer
- 03The engineer who joined in MarchAttended every event of the quarter and has no pair
- 04The designer
- 05The QA engineer
five people · 10 possible pairs · 2 of them have worked on something together · 2 have only been in the same meeting · 6 have never done either
Five of the eight, chosen because all five attended every social event of the quarter.
The quiz night, judged by the measure
An hour of trivia with six colleagues is a pleasant hour. Judged by whether any pair exists afterwards that did not before, it does nothing, and that is fine.
What an offsite can and cannot do
The one expensive event in the calendar is also the only one capable of creating working pairs, and most offsites are arranged so that it does not.
Compulsory fun and who pays for it
An optional event that everybody attends is not optional. Who absorbs the cost of a social calendar, and why it is never the people who schedule it.
The icebreaker problem
Five minutes of personal disclosure at the start of a meeting is asked of everybody and lands differently on each of them. What it buys and what it costs.
Why coffee roulette fades by week six
Randomly paired half-hours start with high attendance and decay on a predictable curve. The mechanism of the decay says something useful about what pairs need.
Games that make pairs by accident
A few activities in the catalogue do produce working pairs, and they share one property: somebody has to depend on somebody else to get an outcome.
The event only the organiser enjoys
Somebody on every team does the organising, the reminding and the cheerfulness. It is unpaid, unevenly distributed, and usually invisible until they stop.
What an all-hands is actually for
The widest row on most pyramids is an hour that everybody attends. It is good at exactly one thing and is routinely asked to do four others.
What to measure the week afterwards
The feedback form after an event asks whether people enjoyed it. A better question takes two minutes, is asked six weeks later, and has a checkable answer.