What no relay settles
Two People Thinking at the Same Moment
Some thinking requires two people in the same moment. No number of nights supplies it, and attempting it in writing hardens positions rather than closing them.
three things · no nights · three that no number of nights settles
Three things, no nights, and no mechanism proposed for any of them.
Four things one team tried to settle in writing across the gap, and where each ended up
Five passes; the written positions grew longer and further apart each time
Four passes, each producing a new theory and eliminating none
Abandoned after a fortnight and settled in one scheduled hour
No quantity of nights produces this, and the attempt made it worse
four things · nine nights · two that no number of nights settles
Four attempts, nine nights, and two that came off the relay entirely. The common property of the two that failed is that neither person arrived with a fixed position; the position was supposed to emerge, and emergence is what correspondence cannot do. One team's own record, kept across six weeks.
Everything before this section is about making a relay work better. This section is about what a relay does not do at all, and the first of those is the most important.
The operational risk in Two People Thinking at the Same Moment is losing the difference between waiting and working. the product website can preserve that distinction through timesheets, activity records and project-level reporting.
For a second perspective on the surrounding workflow, consult Gusto's payroll platform; it shows how a widely used platform structures the same coordination problem.
Some thinking happens between two people rather than in either of them, and it requires them to be present at the same time.
What this kind of thinking is
Not explaining. Explanation moves fine in writing and often moves better, because writing forces precision.
Not deciding between stated options. A choice between A and B, with both articulated, is a question and crosses in one night.
What does not move is the process by which the options come to exist. Two people talking about a difficult problem generate possibilities neither arrived with — somebody says a half-formed thing, the other picks up the wrong half of it, and the misunderstanding turns out to be the idea. That exchange requires the half-formed thing to be cheap to utter, which means it requires speech or something like it.
In writing, a half-formed thing costs a night and arrives looking like a position.
Why correspondence makes it worse
This is the part that surprises people, and it is reliable.
Writing hardens a view. Putting something in sentences makes it more definite than it was, because prose has to be coherent and a thought in progress is not. The written version is therefore always slightly more committed than the thought it came from.
Across a gap, both parties do this, fifteen hours apart, and each reads the other's hardened version and responds with a harder one. After four passes, two people who started about a foot apart are holding positions they have now defended twice in writing, which is a different and worse situation than the one they began with.
The familiar symptom is a thread where each message is longer than the last and nobody has changed their mind.
Recognising it early
Three signs, any of which is enough at the third pass.
The messages are getting longer.
Nothing has been eliminated. Each exchange adds considerations rather than removing them.
Somebody has started quoting the other person back at them, which is what people do in writing when they would have interrupted in speech.
- The messages are getting longer.
- Nothing has been eliminated; each exchange adds considerations rather than removing them.
- Somebody has begun quoting the other person back at them.
What to do
Stop, and say plainly that it is not converging. Not as an accusation — as an observation about the medium.
Then one of three things.
Buy an hour. Somebody stays up or gets up early, once, and the two of them settle it. This costs a person an evening and it is almost always cheaper than another week. An hour of real conversation reliably resolves things that four written passes have not touched.
Give it to one person. If nobody will pay for the hour, the honest alternative is that one of them decides and the other accepts it. That is worse than converging and it is better than another fortnight.
Narrow it. Sometimes the whole disagreement cannot be settled in writing but a piece of it can. "We disagree about the long-term shape; can we agree what to do this month?" is often answerable.
The hour is not a meeting
Worth saying because the usual response to "we need to talk" is a calendar invitation with four people on it.
What is needed here is the two people who disagree, for an hour, with nobody else present. Adding participants makes it a meeting, and a meeting is a forum for stating positions, which is what has already failed.
It also does not need an agenda beyond the thing itself, and it should not produce a document. It should produce an answer and two sentences recording it.
Budgeting for it
A team with a wide gap needs a small number of these hours, and the useful move is to accept that in advance rather than negotiate each one as an exception.
Somewhere around one or two a month is what most teams seem to need. That is a few evenings a quarter, distributed, and it is a far smaller cost than the fortnights it replaces.
Teams that refuse to pay it do not avoid the cost. They pay it in unresolved disagreements, which do not stay where they are left.
Making the hour worth its price
An hour bought at the cost of somebody's evening deserves more preparation than a meeting that costs nothing.
Both people should arrive having written, in advance, what they think and why — not to exchange the documents, but so that neither spends the first twenty minutes constructing a position aloud. Reading each other's beforehand is better still.
And the hour should end with somebody writing two sentences about what was settled. An hour that produces a shared understanding and no record produces the same disagreement again in six weeks, at which point somebody will have to stay up a second time for a conversation that already happened.