The third, planned
Cast bar: three people, each with their own small factory, drawn in outline; one brief, one board and one hold between them; nothing lit, because nothing has run.
Narrator. This chapter is short, and it is all plan. The third factory has not run. Nothing in it is a result, and nothing in it should be read as one. I put it in the book because a plan written down before the first day is the cheapest place to catch a mistake, and because the first two factories taught me what to write down.
Said first: it has not run
Narrator. The third factory has not run yet. Everything in this section is a plan.
Narrator. Now I am planning a third, bigger one, and it shares three things between people: one brief, one board where the work is written down, and one hold. It is for a team I am taking to Web Summit: several people, each to run their own agents. It has not run yet. The parts are the same as the first factory's.
Conductor (pacing, to the reader): Same clock. Same hold. More hands on it.
Narrator. Here is how I expect the three shared things to work day to day, written as a plan, because that is what it is.
Narrator. The brief has one owner, who writes it and changes it. Everyone else reads it, and asks for changes in writing. Two people editing one brief is how a team ends up with two briefs.
Narrator. The board is read every morning by everyone, before their own agents start. Each person's agents write their work there, so nobody has to ask what anybody else did overnight.
Narrator. The hold can be pulled by anyone, human or agent. Who may lift it is written down before the first day: the owner of the brief, and one named person when the owner is away. Until that is written, nobody lifts it.
Figure: three people, each with their own small factory, joined in the middle by one brief, one board and one hold. For the designer.
Band: Dramatised (the conductor's line). The Web Summit team as I described it on 1 November: a plan, not yet run.
What the three shared things need, day to day
Narrator. The three paragraphs above are a plan. Here is what the plan needs before the first day, written down, so that the team does not have to discover it the way the first factory did.
Narrator. One brief, one owner. A clock for each person's agents, at their own minutes, so two people's agents are not writing at once. A board that says, for every piece of work, whose it is. And the hold's two lines, written before anything starts: who may pull it, which is everyone; and who may lift it, which is the brief's owner, and one named person when the owner is away.
Conductor (on the minute, to the reader): Same clock. Same hold. Write down who lifts it before you need it.
Band: Dramatised (the conductor's line). A plan, not yet run.
What the first two factories say to the third
Narrator. Everything in the plan above comes from something the first two factories did, or failed to do. The hold anyone may pull came from the talk's first night. The rule that only one person lifts it, and that someone is named for when that person is away, came from this book's evening of 1 November and from a reader's question about who owns the stop button. The board read every morning came from the nine hours in which I started nothing and the team still knew what everyone had done. One owner for the brief came from the brief that was wrong in places and was never corrected.
Narrator. None of that proves the plan will work. It only says where each part of it was learned.
Do this now
If you will work with others, write the hold's two lines now: who may pull it, and who may lift it when its owner is away. Until you have, nobody does.
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Where this came from
My description of the Web Summit team, 1 November 2026, as I gave it in the conductor's session: a plan, not yet run, its people not named here. The editions' team box. This book's wake rules, for the hold's rule. The chapters of this book where each part of the plan was learned. The storyteller's outline for this chapter. This chapter keeps the second half of the 70-page edition's chapter 14.