Working Agreements - 13 Dec 2019

Listening to the Brave New Work podcast last night and it got me thinking that this tool here (Gitbook) might be a perfect place to start logging working agreements and have us all think and be able to contribute and discuss things in public and ongoing. So... I think I'm going to start creating space for that... here (in the spirit of 'is this safe to try, for now' and also, transparency...)

I also loved the one comment Rodney made that once you have working agreements, if someone behaves contrary to them, instead of doing the thing where you side-bar with someone else and say "hey, did you notice that Chad never..." instead you approach the person and say "hey, I noticed that..." and their response could be anything from "fuck, you're right, my bad" to "yeah, we say that's an agreement, but we've never discussed it, people only do that when it suits them..."

They also emphasised, in their conversation with the Slack chief engineer, the difference between 'standard' and 'default' - with a standard being close to a 'rule', whereas 'default' is how we expect each other to behave unless there's a reason to do things differently.

(Also loved that at Slack the dev teams are all free to do 'agile' differently, whereas use of emoji's is constrained by fairly strict norms. i.e. communication about things is all-important, how you actually do the things is less important.)