Happy Friday!

I'm nervous about this email. This email will talk through, at a high level, the point of no return for teams. Before this point, you can get a good team. After this point, you get an exceptional team that will quit if not treated with respect.

Most people's intuition and understanding of performance and efficiency are poor.

Here's a little example for you to noodle on. Consider fire departments in terms of productivity and efficiency.

Want a contrast? Think about airport security lines.

Now imagine fire departments ran like airport security. Think about airport security being run like a fire department.

This isn't an email about efficiency or productivity in some academic sense, but I do need to establish that most people are dead wrong about it.

By now, our team is getting its legs under. It feels like a bright future ahead. I'm watching for a lot of the qualities from that very first email, and I'm making a judgment call. Is this team strong enough for the last challenge?

If I think they are strong enough, I ask if the team would be interested in the hardest but most rewarding challenge of their career. Then, I introduce a set of standards and take time to educate the team on them thoroughly. After all, their understanding of productivity is just as bad.

These conversations are always funny in a way. By now, the team knows me pretty well, and we can joke and tease. They also know by now that I'm not the kind of person who makes things up. So, during these talks, the team almost always accuses me of being nuts.

And then someone always says, "Has Ryan ever been wrong?"

I'm guilty of using lines around this talk like, "I'll make a bet with you right now for any amount of money you want up to my consulting fee."

Don't do this.

I do it because I enjoy a bit of chaos in my life, but more importantly, I'm very much an expert in what I do, and that's a bet I won't lose.

For the record, the most anyone bet me was $100. They lost, and I forgave the bet.

The topics I introduce are pair/mob-programming, test-driven development, and wip limits.

These topics are controversial on their own, and I bring them as a single impossible unit.

For any one of these, you need someone's experience if you also want success. They're so counter-intuitive that people's first experience will lead to rejection unless you can coach them through it. WIP limits are brutal for teams to experience and are the closest thing I've seen to a silver bullet.

The teams get to choose to adopt these practices or not, and if so, that team crosses the point of no return. The transformation they experience while working with these new practices is irreversible. The team will never look at things the same way, never solve problems the same way, and will never accept the old status quo again.

In the few days and weeks after this, the individuals on the team will experience what I might describe as a crisis. What they will be learning through action will go against everything they've learned in their career so far. Within a few days of this, they will write software faster and better than they ever have, and annoying parts of their process that have been that way for years will be eliminated. Yet it is a crisis because their beliefs are changing.

What emerges is a team that is so much better than the ones around it that most people will think it's a lie.

Sincerely,

Ryan

PS: I recently gave a talk on WIP limits that is very much related to all of this. You should check it out and let me know what you think!