Sitting in traffic today I realized that teams of people are either like stop lights or four-way stop signs.

Stop lights are nice because everybody knows the rules, and they aren’t flexible. Everybody knows what everybody else should be doing, which is either sitting there idling, burning expensive fuel, or driving forward full-blast. Big queues build up sometimes behind a stop light, blocking other streets. When the stop lights aren’t timed perfectly (and they rarely are) you get these gobs of cars hurrying, then waiting, then hurrying again. One thing is true, though: that clueless guy talking on his cell phone doesn’t mess things up too much. Even they can figure out when to go.

Stop signs are different, especially the four-way kind. Your driving instructor told you that things move around to the right, but in practice there are tons of shortcuts, simple optimizations people make. Like if the fellow across from you is going straight you can, too, at the same time. Or being able to turn right, out of order. If you’re waiting for your turn at the game you keep moving steadily forward, always advancing. When you get to the game, though, you find that things are very fluid, and you had better know what you’re doing or you’ll mess it up for everybody. That clueless guy on his cell phone screws up the whole system, though, requiring heroism from others to get things back to normal.

Seems to me that’s exactly like most teams. Lots of teams start out as a stop sign, but eventually they get someone who is the equivalent of a cell phone idiot, not paying attention to their job, messing it up for everybody. So it takes a hero to fix things that cell phone idiot breaks, but eventually the hero can’t keep up, and management puts in a stop light. Lots of rules, lots of forced latency, and very little flexibility forcing everybody else down to cell phone idiot’s level, a lowest common denominator. The strangest thing is that “stop lights” get labeled as progress. Managers pat each other on the back for the standardization, the procedural improvements, etc. when all they really did was encourage universal mediocrity by not removing the cell phone idiot from the team. Congratulations, you crippled your team and kept substandard employees! Real progress would be if teams took down the stop signs altogether, by finding and removing delays & obstacles to getting things done.

It’s been years since I’ve seen a yield sign, or an intersection without a sign at all. I miss them.