I have written before about the great office I had for this season … whiteboards on both big walls, and a big conference room table, a very nice dining table actually. None of that mattered, because it was very early in the morning and the whole team was in there, seated around it … and if you wonder about tech guys and mornings, that is never a good sign. Overnight there had been a hiccup that meant none of the NeXT users could log on, work, or run their applications … and we didn’t know why. Our pagers had been going off since very early, and now we were all gathered to … what?
A small aside. My dad was a computer person, and when my mom couldn’t sleep, she would say “Tell me again how computers work.” I will try NOT to put you to sleep, but a little “cloud” is warranted. In 1994, a 56K modem was a big deal. We had small servers on each corner of each floor of each building, providing local services on behalf of remote servers. The wonder was that the computer you were using felt “next door” … when it was actually across the street (literally), or if it was a REAL disaster, not in DC at all, but out in Herndon, VA.
Those servers needed to know 1) who you are, 2) what you are trying to do, and 3) that you are allowed to do that. And we updated that every night from a trusted “master source,” in case someone joined, left, or changed roles. Except the master source was pretty flaky. For reasons another team was sorting out, it had decided we had NO users, deleted all of them … and our downstream servers dutifully deleted theirs, and were now about as helpful as a doorstop. If you were paranoid, and we sorta were, you could think they did this just to the NeXT computers … but no, it hit everyone, and that meant a LOT of people running around…
Watching a high-performing team work together turns out to be rare. I once asked a different team of 30 whether they had ever been on a good team … in any context, church, non-profit, sports. Anywhere. Half raised their hand … which meant that to the other half, “Team” was a bad experience. That floored me, and I am not sure I ever asked again. I started assuming “Team” was a dirty word to many, and that I had to demonstrate the need, the ability, and the skills for every member to find their part in building 1. I had been on so many good ones (and a few … well…) that it was sad to realize this Promise was not normal…
Songwriting is like that too. We rarely see it happen, but watch the brothers build a song together sometime. Seth starts, Scott comes in and adds his part, and the magic starts … you see it on their faces as they complete each other’s thoughts, and a good song turns into an amazing, different song.
… that is what I got to watch that morning … when building the team pays off. We had been together long enough to have a silent language of who would do what. The character I want to talk about is Owl … the wise, calm voice who mentors and teaches the others, appears the most intelligent, and is actually quite scatterbrained and long-winded. Ours was all of that, and brilliant, with 1 critical quality: he could think deeply with the ____ hitting the fan all around him. That calmness, that detachment … I still have no idea where it came from…
… but we knew others on the team would get the system up immediately, and that by tomorrow, Owl would Promise to have programmed something so THIS would NEVER happen again … the ultimate compliment you can pay an engineer. So the “scatterbrained and long-winded” … we all knew to let him be, it will make sense to him, and we will catch up. An amazing wonder was pairing him with Pooh: life-changing, or life-threatening, depending on what they were up to. The creative wonder from those 2, with another member you’ll meet tomorrow … they are the benchmark of the best team I have ever been on…
… and notice I say “on.” I mostly got out of their way, ran interference with those above, and added a little encouragement. Not long after I first wrote this, I was driving to meet a new team, and started mapping them to the Pooh characters … and just like that, I had a roadmap for moving a group of random players into a team I had great confidence would be amazing. You can do that too … once you see what roles are needed, and that those characters are metaphors for the qualities humans bring, differently and the same, to everything.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: take 5 minutes on your next drive in and map your team to the 100 Acre Wood. Who is your Owl? Who is missing?
So use what you have, instead of always playing … I Wish I Was…
