The rhythm: two kinds of trigger

Cast bar: six agents through the morning; the editor back from hour fourteen.

The schedule and me

Clock: Hours one to nineteen.

Words for this page: a trigger is what starts a wake. On the day there were two kinds: the schedule, firing each member at its own minute, and me, starting a member's session by typing into it. A third, the follow-up, was a wake a member started itself to finish something.

Narrator. Every wake of the day was started by one of those. The register counts them all: 162 wakes, 105 started by the schedule, 47 by me, and 10 follow-ups. Laid out hour by hour, they draw the day better than anything I could write.

Figure: the day by trigger, hour by hour, in two colours: the schedule's wakes and mine, with the follow-ups as a third mark. The chapter's infographic, at full size.

Narrator. Three shapes in that picture. In the small hours, most wakes are mine: the members' own records of those hours show their onboarding, their keys and the five steps being built. From just after four to about ten to two, there is only one colour. Five or six wakes an hour, every hour, all on the clock. Then I come back, and from mid-afternoon the two colours run side by side, with more wakes in an hour than at any time before, until the hold.

Narrator. The middle stretch is the one people ask about. Nothing in it waited for me. A member woke at its minute, read its mail and its board, did one step of its work with its reviews, and went back to sleep. The next one did the same at its own minute. The morning is just that, over and over, with nobody watching.

Band: The register's count of wakes by trigger, and its hourly table.

Sent back, and owned

Clock: Hours five to fourteen.

Narrator. What does a team do with a morning to itself? On the record, it reviews its own work and sends it back.

Narrator. The longest thread is one picture. ruv-sgit made a picture for the talk from real data, and at twenty past six deck reviewed it.

Deck (exacting, to ruv-sgit): "What it is not yet is a picture a room reads in five seconds." (record)

Deck (gentler): The data is honest. The table and the diagram sit side by side and never touch. A room will not do that work for you.

ruv-sgit (sheepish): Back to the workshop.

Narrator. About eighty minutes later the second version came in, and at twenty past eight deck kept it: "Numbered dots, plain words and named rings make it readable", with two things to fix next time, a summary that ran into a heading, and dots that should sit together by sector. The third version came in before one, and deck passed it just before I came back, ready for me to see. Three rounds, one picture, and I started none of them.

ruv-sgit (absorbed, ruler in hand): Back to the workshop, twice. That is what the workshop is for.

Narrator. In between, the designer found its own mistake. A rule in its design table had sent dev the wrong text sizes, and dev had built exactly what the table said.

Designer (mortified): "The miss is my table's as much as the build's" (record). Dev built what I specified. I specified it wrong.

Narrator. And the conductor, patiently, about the "@" again.

Conductor (patient): You left the "@" off your name again, ruv-sgit. The team counts each agent's work by that name, so it cannot see yours.

Narrator. Nobody was watching, and they argued, sent work back, owned their mistakes and kept the books. That is the part of the record I find hardest to believe, and easiest to check.

Figure: one picture's three rounds side by side: the first sent back, the second kept with two notes, the third kept and put to the editor; under each, deck's verdict in its own words.

Band: Dramatised. Rests on deck's three reviews of one picture (06:21, 08:21, 13:48), the designer's note (10:49) and the conductor's note (10:05); the quoted lines are theirs.

What a session cannot carry

Narrator. One more thing about the rhythm, because it shapes everything in part 5. A wake is short, and a session does not last for ever. When a session ends, whatever was only in its head is gone. A member's container is reset; a key it made and did not save is lost; a thought it did not write down was never had.

Narrator. So the members wrote everything down, all the time, and not only out of tidiness. ruv-sgit's page of rules says it plainly:

"The container is ephemeral. A vault whose key is lost when the session ends can never be read again; seal or delete before the session ends, or say in the debrief which vaults are open" (record)

Narrator. Every wake ends with a debrief and a status file. The next wake, by the same member or by a new session taking its place, starts by reading them. That is how a team with no memory of its own remembers: in files, read first.

ruv-sgit (looking up from the bench, for once): If it is not in a file, it did not happen.

Band: Dramatised (ruv-sgit's last line). The quoted rule is ruv-sgit's own.

Do this now

Decide which work runs on a clock and which waits for you, and write it down. Then make every wake end with a short note the next one reads first.

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Where this came from

The register's count of wakes by trigger and its hourly table. The talk's repository at the end of the day: deck's three reviews of one picture and its debrief, the designer's note, the conductor's note, ruv-sgit's page of rules and the wake rules. The historian's account of the day by trigger. The storyteller's outline for this chapter. Lines kept word for word from the 30-page edition: the scenes of the morning.