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What to do instead

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 people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together

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  1. 01The senior engineerThe pair that came out of a shared on-call week
  2. 02The second engineer
  3. 03The designer
  4. 04The data analyst
  5. 05The product manager
Have worked on something togetherHave only been in the same meetingHave never done either

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.

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Method

A fair pilot starts with a written purpose and shared baseline; managers can review how the platform works before comparing what changes after a new working practice.

For further reading outside this collection, see material published by Cornell ILR School.

Six of the eight, with the manager and the senior engineer left out, so that what remains is what the team has without them

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  1. 01The engineer who joined in MarchNo pair with anybody, in either state
  2. 02The second engineerEleven months on the team
  3. 03The designerShared with two other teams
  4. 04The data analyst
  5. 05The product manager
  6. 06The QA engineer
Have only been in the same meetingHave never done either

six people · 15 possible pairs · not one of them has worked on anything together · 4 have only been in the same meeting · 11 have never done either

Six of the eight people counted on this site. Every working pair this team has runs through one of the two people left out of this grid, which is why there are none in it.

The panel above is the team with its two most connected members removed. What is left is six people, fifteen possible pairs, and not one of them has produced anything together. Four of the fifteen are near-misses; eleven are nothing at all.

That is the starting position for the quarter described here. It is a realistic one, and so is the result: at the end of thirteen weeks that grid should have three or four filled cells in it, which is a small number and is most of the structural change this method is capable of.

Week one

  1. Take the count and write it down with the date and the rule. It takes twenty minutes. The note on the first number to write down has the procedure.
  2. Do the seam audit in the same sitting: go through the last quarter and list every place where the work actually crossed between two people and went badly. Each entry names a pair.
  3. Pick four pairs for the quarter. Prefer pairs named by the seam audit, then near-misses, then anybody with an empty row. Do not pick a pair that already works.

Weeks one to two

Start the review rota. This is the first mechanism and it is the cheapest: a fortnightly rotation of who reviews whose work, ordered so that it pairs people who have never worked together. It costs nothing, it uses time already being spent, and it runs on its own for the rest of the quarter.

Start the rotating weekly note in the same week, and take it out of the status meeting rather than adding it. One author per week, half a page, fixed format, the author has to ask the other seven. By week nine everybody has had a turn.

Those two running together are most of the quarter's work and they take about an hour a week of somebody's time in total.

Weeks two, five, eight and eleven

One deliberate pairing each. Two named people, one output that needs both, a date within a week or two, somebody waiting for the result, no manager in it, and no announcement that it is a pairing exercise.

Spacing them a month apart is deliberate. Four at once is a reorganisation; four spread across a quarter is four ordinary assignments, which is what they should look like from the inside.

If one of them does not happen — somebody is away, the work falls through — let it go and do the next one. Three out of four is a good quarter.

Weeks six and nine

The second task for the first two pairs. This is the step most likely to be dropped and it is what makes the pairs last: a single shared task produces a relationship that decays in a few months, and a second one a month later produces one that holds.

It does not have to be as big as the first. The point is the second occasion.

Week thirteen

Count again. Same rule, same people, new date.

Then ask the four pairs, separately, whether they would now take a question to the other. That answer matters more than the count, and it is the only part of this that cannot be gamed.

What to expect

Three or four new pairs, of which two or three will still be live in six months. At least one empty row filled. The number of relationships that do not run through the manager up from one to four or five.

The total count up by about half, which sounds impressive and is mostly an artefact of starting from a low base.

And one thing that is not a number: the team's conversations about itself get more concrete. "We should collaborate more" is replaced by "the designer and the QA engineer have never worked on anything", which is a sentence somebody can act on.

If you only do one of the four things

Do the review rota.

It costs nothing, it uses time that is already being spent, it runs for the rest of the quarter without anybody remembering it, and it produces pairs on a schedule rather than when somebody has the energy to arrange one.

The rotating note is second: an hour a week of somebody's time, seven exchanges per rotation, and it replaces a meeting rather than adding to the calendar.

The four deliberate pairings are the most effective per instance and the most likely to be skipped, because each one requires a decision in a week when there are more urgent decisions. Which is the argument for starting with the two mechanisms that do not need deciding again.

What not to expect

Morale to change. The things in this quarter are structural and the effect on how people feel is indirect, slow and partly dependent on things outside it.

The shape to hold on its own. A team that stops doing any of this will drift back toward a wheel within a year, because the default routing of work rebuilds it. The two rotations are the parts that keep running without attention, which is the argument for starting with them.

And nothing here fixes a team whose problem is not structural. If the difficulty is between two specific people, or about workload, or about what the team has been asked to do, a quarter of pairings will produce a slightly denser grid and no relief at all.

Also on whether this is a team