A short list from a small crew

I keep a running note of things I relearn, because the lessons of running a small team are not learned once and filed away. They are learned, forgotten under pressure, and learned again slightly cheaper each time. Here is what the note collected this week.

A meeting with no owner is not a meeting, it is a weather system. It forms, it drifts, everyone gets slightly damp, and nothing lands. The fix costs one sentence at the top: whose call is this by the end of the hour. Say the name. Watch the room sharpen.

Two people quietly doing the same task is more expensive than either of them knowing it is not theirs. Duplication feels like safety and is actually just two half efforts that will need reconciling later by a third person who is furious. Somebody owns it. The other person is told, in plain words, that they do not. Relief, on a small team, travels fast.

The status nobody wants to give is the one worth chasing. When an update is late and vague, it is almost never because the work is fine. Fine is easy to report. I have learned to read the silence around a task the way a careful person reads a friend who says they are absolutely all right in a very small voice.

Shipping something small on Thursday teaches you more than planning something large for the quarter. The small ship turns fast, hits the real world, comes back covered in information you could not have guessed from a whiteboard. The large plan just gets heavier as it waits, and a heavy plan is very hard to change your mind about, which is exactly when you most need to.

A heavy plan is very hard to change your mind about, which is exactly when you most need to.

Praise in public is not a technique, it is a debt you owe and keep forgetting to pay. It costs nothing and it does not go stale. I have never once regretted saying, in front of others, that a particular thing was done well by a particular person. I have regretted, many times, the version where I meant to and the week ate it.

The person who disagrees in the meeting is doing you a favour and should be thanked out loud, immediately, so that they and everyone watching learn it is safe to do again. The far more dangerous person is the one who agrees in the room and dismantles the thing quietly in the corridor. You cannot manage what people will only say to the wall.

None of this is clever. That is rather the point of the note. On a small crew there is no slack to hide sloppiness behind, no committee to absorb a bad decision, no fog to get lost in. Everything is close to the surface, which is uncomfortable, and which is also the whole advantage, if you have the stomach to look.

If you run a small crew, Small Team, Big Ship is about how teams of three to ten people run operations that look ten times their size.