Let's focus less on team-wide consensus and review

[michielbdejong]

I don't think the work of individual team members should always be reviewed by the entire team.

I think we could become more productive as a team if we would all try to be more Zen about other team members doing work.

When you see another team member "doing something wrong", try to resist the knee-jerk reaction to call them out and hold them responsible. Instead, try to be curious and find out why that other team member did something in a way that was unexpected to you. You might learn from it, and you leave both yourself and the other person in a positive vibe where we all contribute instead of getting into debates.

This is obviously hard to do, and sure, important decisions need more pairs of eyes on them, and no single team member should run off in a direction that they can reasonably know that other team members would do very differently. We all try to work in the context of the team, and for the team's goal, never for individual goals. And peer review is definitely useful to increase the quality of everybody's work.

But the ideal of always reaching a "committee consensus" on every action, which we sometimes seem to aim for, is actually a dystopia in which nothing gets done and all actions are blocked by discussions.

Even with these caveats, when I brought this up in the team chat though, it seemed not everybody agreed, so let's have a discussion about it.

If team member Alice is doing work and team member Bob is not, but Bob is just pointing out the mistakes that Alice is making, and questioning whether all Alice's work is based on team-wide consensus or not, there is a real risk that Alice's enthusiasm will be smothered in discussions.

I think our team's output would be many times greater if we would just all try to be Alices more often, and be Bobs less often. :)

Let's try to be a team where everybody feels empowered to contribute and the whole is bigger than the parts, instead of a team where every action is preceded by a consensus meeting and followed by a review and a retrospective.

[michielbdejong]

Resolved by f31dc1f