Theseus’s software engineering team
According to legend, Theseus, the mythical Greek founder-king of Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos.
Each year, the Athenians commemorated this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship?
Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch and more recently Hobbes, Locke engaged into the talk bringing their thinking and perspective but there is simply no right answer.
Some say the physical components made the ship, other say the mission made the ship, other stick with the navigators… 🤷♂
As a director of engineering I question pretty much everything all the time:
- Is there are a better way of building software?
- Are people learning and growing?
- Are we picking the right battles?
- …
but there is a question that stands up among the others:
What turns a group of people into a team?
Surprisingly after 19 years in the industry I can’t give you a straight answer, I just barely developed the instincts to distinguish between a group of ticket eaters and a real team, let’s scratch the surface.
Is the constitution?
We can think that a team is simply made by people, just the names…but what about their circumstances? what about their motivations? what about the challenge they are facing?
The same group of people having great dynamics for a mission will fail miserably if the mission changes or simply stop behaving as they had because their own motivations change in time.
Is the mission?
Maybe a fixed mission determines the reality of a team, as long as the group chases one well defined goal in a windowed fraction of time the team remains…🤔
But the same group of people with a given name will face several challenges in a few months and as long as the dynamics stay around nobody would ever say those are different teams.
Is the behaviour?
Think about it…maybe the closest to reality? I agree.
A team is what the group does when there is a requisite gap, when production is down, when there is something to celebrate, when somebody gets blocked.
If you have a repetitive, foreseeable and desirable behaviour in all these and other circumstances you have a team.
Why is any of this important?
Team chemistry is everything.
If curious, you can look for “Team work”, “High productive teams” and things like that in https://www.researchgate.net/ or https://scholar.google.com/ , the scientific evidences are clear.
Identifying desirable behaviours, praising them in public, bringing new people into them, reviewing and adapting your ways is the foundational aspect of team chemistry development.
Your quarter goals will change, your mission statement will change and your people, unfortunately, will change too but the culture, the identity of the group can remain if you take care of it.
That’s why here in JOOR we praise behaviour such as Audrey’s focus to improve our pipelines through the storm or Melanie’s desire to unblock any teammate or Antonella’s instinct to document any decision or Paula’s eye to a identify a problem coming or, weird stuff like Alberto’s collection of Pope’s emojis, Omar & Claudia’s themed backgrounds or Edu’s obsession to clap out of meetings.
In the end, a team is more than a list of names, technologies and projects, a team is a set of behaviours.
Hiring?
It depends on when you read this but mostly always yes 😎
