The Mechanics of Teamwork

Is your team operating on luck or logic? Before you read this guide, look at your last two weeks of work.

• Do meetings start 5+ minutes late more than twice a week?
• Do decisions get revisited or debated after they were supposedly made?
• Does "urgent" mean something different to your manager than it does to you?
• Do you hesitate to point out when a process is broken because you don't want to be "negative"?

If you answered YES to any of these, you either do not have working agreements or your current working agreements are just wall decoration. You are relying on good intentions rather than mechanisms. You need the process below.

Most working agreements end up as wall decoration. Teams spend an hour writing platitudes like "be respectful" and "communicate openly," print them on a poster, stick them on a wall, and never look at them again.

Three months later, people still show up late to meetings. Decisions still get made without the right people. Messages still go unanswered for days. The team burns energy on preventable friction because the agreements they created don't actually guide behavior.

The problem isn't the intention. But as Jeff Bezos famously noted, "Good intentions don't work, mechanisms do." Most teams rely on the good intention of "being respectful," but fail to build the mechanism that defines what that looks like.

This guide provides a process that produces agreements teams actually follow because they created them, debated them, and committed to enforcing them together.