What to do instead
What to do instead
The things that actually make pairs. Most of them cost nothing and several are already on your team's calendar doing something else.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The senior engineerThe pair that came out of a shared on-call week
- 02The second engineer
- 03The designer
- 04The data analyst
- 05The product manager
five people · 10 possible pairs · 1 of them has worked on something together · 3 have only been in the same meeting · 6 have never done either
Five of the eight, with the manager left out so that what remains is what the team has without them.
Pair on one real task this week
The core intervention, in full. Two named people, one piece of work that needs both, a date near enough to force a conversation, and nothing else.
Rotate who writes the weekly note
One person compiles what the team did, and the person changes each week. It costs an hour, replaces a meeting, and makes seven real exchanges as a side effect.
Make code review a pairing device
Review already happens. Deciding who reviews whom, and rotating it, converts an existing process into the cheapest pair-making mechanism available.
Give two people one deadline
Shared responsibility for an outcome produces the conversations that shared membership never does. The mechanism, the version that fails, and why.
Stop being the only route between people
A manager who answers every question correctly keeps the network at its current size. Answering with a name instead is slower and more durable.
Build the directory you actually need
Every organisation has a directory of who people are. Almost none has one of what people know, which is the thing anybody actually searches for.
A quarter of small deliberate pairings
A thirteen-week plan with four pairings, two mechanisms and one measurement, and what it is reasonable to expect from a quarter of it.
The whole argument in one page
For somebody who arrived here first: the claim, the measure, the three things it says about one team, and the shortest useful thing to do about it.