Working in lean and agile teams feels natural and human because they're primarily an oral culture. But oral cultures have problems too. We found helpful ways to solve these by moving to a more written culture at @LocalWelcome

(thread) https://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/fixing-problems-with-our-oral-culture

1. Live meeting notes make for better meetings

We had more focused, productive, equitable meetings when we started taking (and displaying) live meeting notes.

https://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/fixing-problems-with-our-oral-culture#livenotes

2. Shared documents collapse distance

Working remotely felt like being in the same room when we collaborated on the same document at the same time.

https://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/fixing-problems-with-our-oral-culture#shareddocuments

3. Documenting operations improves resilience

We abandoned our oral culture for operations and wrote things down because we couldn't hold it all in our head.

https://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/fixing-problems-with-our-oral-culture#operations

4. Automating is easier if things are written down

We found it much easier to identify and fix problems using automation when looking at well-documented processes.

https://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/fixing-problems-with-our-oral-culture#automating

5. Notion makes a better written culture possible

Our written culture was only possible because Notion is the intranet tool that all our workplaces deserve

https://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/fixing-problems-with-our-oral-culture#notion

Tradeoffs and mitigations in our written culture

Of course, moving everything to a written culture isn't the answer. Things are never that simple! Written cultures have problems too and we found tradeoffs to mitigate these.

https://www.myddelton.co.uk/blog/fixing-problems-with-our-oral-culture#tradeoffs

I'm not saying abandon oral cultures entirely. I love working in lean and agile teams.

But experience has shown me that the natural, human things we love can (and do) stack up into serious problems in the longer term. Moving to a written culture can help with parts of that