The yes you give in the corridor

Somebody stops you on the way back from the kettle. It takes ten seconds. Could you just cast an eye over the thing, could the team just squeeze in the small extra, could you just have a quick look before Thursday. You say yes, because yes is the friendly word and because saying it costs nothing in the corridor. The cost arrives later, in a different currency, on a different day, and by then nobody remembers the corridor.

I have run small teams for long enough to know that we do not lose our weeks to the big decisions. Those get meetings, and owners, and someone frowning at a plan. We lose our weeks to the little unminuted yeses, the ones nobody wrote down because they did not feel like commitments at the time. They feel like courtesy. They are courtesy. They are also, added up across a fortnight, the reason the actual work slid.

The favour that was never sized

The trouble with the corridor yes is that it skips the one step that protects a small crew, which is sizing the thing before you agree to it. In a proper request you get to ask how big, and by when, instead of only what. In a corridor you get none of that. The person asking has, quite honestly, no idea how big the favour is, because from their side it is small: it is one thing, once. From your side it is the ninth one thing that week, and the nine of them together have eaten the afternoon you were keeping for the work that actually had your name on it.

I am not arguing against helping each other. A team that will not do a quick favour is not a team, it is a set of desks. I am arguing that the quick favour deserves the same half question the big one gets. How big, and by when. Said kindly, in the corridor, in the same ten seconds.

Make the yes visible

The fix is not a policy. Small teams die of policies. The fix is to drag the corridor yes into the light, where the rest of the week can see it. When I say yes to something in passing now, I make myself do one unglamorous thing before I forget: I write it where my other work is written. Not to build a case. To make it real. A commitment that lives only in two people's memories is not a commitment, it is a disappointment with a delay on it.

Once it is written down next to everything else, something useful happens on its own. You can see that you have said yes to six hours of favours and you have four hours left, and the arithmetic makes the decision for you before Thursday makes it for you badly. You get to go back, in the corridor, and say the honest thing: yes, but not by Thursday, or yes, but then this other thing waits. That is not a smaller yes. It is a yes someone can actually rely on.

A commitment that lives only in two people's memories is not a commitment, it is a disappointment with a delay on it.

The corridor is not the enemy. Half the good work of a small team happens on the way to the kettle. But the word yes is doing more than it looks like it is doing when you hand it over standing up. Give it the same second thought sitting down that you would give it in a meeting, and you will find you have bought back a surprising amount of your own week, at a price of about ten seconds and a small act of writing things down.

On a team that small, every casual yes is borrowed from the work, and Small Team, Big Ship looks at how crews of three to ten keep a big ship moving anyway.