When a team is younger than it looks

The three things team age governs

How many pairs have had time to form. A working relationship takes something like a quarter of shared occasions to become one. A team whose median membership is nine months has had time for perhaps two or three rounds of that per person, which is consistent with the six pairs on its grid.

Whether the recurring things have recurred. Planning rounds, seasonal peaks, audits, renewals. A team younger than a year has met each of them once at most, and the first encounter with an annual event is always more expensive than the second.

Whether anybody can answer why. The most expensive gap in a young team is not skill; it is that every decision older than the team has to be reconstructed from artefacts rather than recalled.

The error this causes

A manager with a group of experienced people reasonably concludes that the team needs less support than a group of new hires, and that conclusion is correct about individual capability and wrong about everything structural.

Experienced individuals in a new team still have no pairs, still have no shared vocabulary, still do not know what each other means by "done", and still cannot answer each other's questions about this team's history, because there is none.

What they do have is the ability to get things done outside the team, which masks the problem for a while. Each person routes around the missing network using their own organisational connections, which works and leaves the team exactly as sparse as it was.

Reading the two sums together

Divide the team tenure by the company tenure and you get a rough figure for how much of this group's experience is experience of each other. Sixty-seven over two hundred and thirty-five is a bit under a third, and that is on the low side.

A figure close to one — people who joined the company and the team together — means a team built by hiring. More things are written down, because nothing could be assumed, and there are fewer routes out into the rest of the organisation.

A low figure means a team assembled from inside, which is faster to start and has the specific hollowness described above.

What to do differently with a young team

Three adjustments, none of them expensive.

• Write down decisions for a year longer than feels necessary. On an old team the reasons live in people; on a young one there is nobody to hold them, and the cost of reconstructing one is a day.
• Pair deliberately for the first year, then stop if it is no longer needed. The mechanisms in the last part of this site are most valuable in a team's first four quarters and become unnecessary in a team that has developed its own occasions.
• And resist reading the first annual cycle as a performance. A team meeting its first planning round, its first peak and its first audit will handle all three worse than it will next year, and attributing that to the people is the commonest unfair judgement in this subject.

The team that is older than it looks

The opposite case exists and is rarer, and it has its own failure.

A team whose members have been together for four years, in a company most of them joined for this job, has deep shared memory and a grid that stopped changing a long time ago. Everybody knows who to ask. The pairs that exist are strong and the ones that do not exist have had four years not to form, which is its own kind of evidence.

What such a team loses is routes out. Nobody has organisational connections anywhere else, so every question that cannot be answered inside the team becomes a formal request. It is a team with a dense rim and no spokes pointing outward, and it is as fragile in its own way.

The lines that could not be drawn

Two of the rows given to the panel above are impossible. One puts twenty months on a team inside fourteen at the company. The other gives somebody no company time at all — they were on the list a week before they started.

Neither is interesting as an error. Both are interesting because a table would have accepted them silently, and a drawing cannot: a segment that runs past the end of its track, or a track with no length, is visible from across the room.