Two Crossings, both of them solo#

You stood there. You started it. If it worked, it worked because you were standing there starting it.

That’s a real skill and you now have it. It also doesn’t scale, and this fortnight is about what happens when you need it to.

George Curious

You didn’t pick this team#

Four other people, assigned for this Crossing, for two weeks. Nobody asked you who you’d have chosen.

That’s not an oversight. A team you choose is a team you already know how to work with, and knowing how to work with people you didn’t choose is most of what a hallway actually asks of you.

Set Up Shop

George Curious

Five of you is not five times one of you#

Ringelmann hooked a rope to a pressure gauge and had people pull. Add pullers and the total climbs. Each person’s share of it falls.

Latané ran it again with clapping and shouting, and split the loss in two: some of it is bad coordination, and some of it is just effort.

George Curious

Why it happens, and what fixes it#

Effort drops when nobody can tell whose effort it was. Set people shouting in a group, measure each person’s output separately, and the effect disappears — it was never laziness, it was being un-measurable.

So: distinct jobs, named out loud, before the table goes up. Not because I want a list. Because “we all did a bit of everything” is the exact condition the effect needs.

George Curious

Bigger isn’t flashier#

More exposure. More hours it has to stay up. More people who have to actually turn up for it to exist at all.

More that can go wrong is the feature, not the risk you’re supposed to engineer out.

George Curious

Put a third thing between you#

A bench, a bin and a phone, scattered, each get very little use. Put them together with a coffee cart and people arrive.

Nobody stops to talk to a table. They stop for the thing on it — the absurd object, the question they can answer in one word, the board that’s already got four answers on it and needs a fifth.

Your stall’s job is to be the third thing.

George Curious

Build the part that does the inviting#

A sign has to work when none of you are there to explain it. So does a chalk line on the floor, a jar with a slot, an arrow.

Write it for the person who is already walking past and did not slow down. If it needs you standing beside it to make sense, it isn’t done.

George Curious

What’s actually checked#

• your team, assigned for this Crossing, set up something bigger in scale than an earlier solo Crossing — more people, more time invested, more that could go wrong
• it can run without any one teammate standing right next to it the whole time
• a stranger could walk up to it without any of you starting the conversation first
• each of you came away with a clip of the stall running — the third of your five

Set Up Shop

George Curious

The clip is still yours alone#

Third of five. Five phones pointed at the same five minutes of the same stall is completely fine — five people handing in one clip is not.

Everything else this fortnight is shared. That one isn’t, because Legacy is still yours in week 12.

George Curious

Then all five of you stand at the front#

Week 6 isn’t the usual circle. One slot per team, a fuller room than you’re used to, and the whole team up there for it — Hallway Showcase.

Building it in the hallway is half. This is the other half — one account between five of you, and questions aimed at the stall rather than at any one of you. “That was someone else’s part” isn’t an answer up there.

George Curious

Four questions your account has to answer#

The after-action review, more or less as the army runs it: what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, why there was a difference, and what you’ve learned.

Questions two and three are where the Showcase actually lives. Every team turns up able to answer question one. Almost nobody turns up with three.

What that presentation has to contain is on Midsemester Checkpoint.

George Curious