Welcome to The Overlap, a biweekly newsletter somewhere between product and organization design. It comes out every other Wednesday morning.
This one’s on the importance of good vibes. Yes, good vibes.
I’m beginning to believe that good vibes are just as important (if not more important) for teams than working agreements.
This is a big deal for me! I’m a fanboi of written things:
I’ve been writing on my personal site since 2015.
My first team, The Ready, hired me full-time because they liked my writing.
A big reason I was drawn to Sanctuary was how often they (we) wrote (write) online.
And I’m a big fan of Murmur. Companies can use other companies’ written working agreements (e.g., Patagonia’s parental leave policy) as templates of their own.
Then, I read this article by Rich Decibels. This point stood out to me:
Small groups can maintain a lot of togetherness without much explicit structure. We can hold shared context without needing to agree precisely on the words that describe that context.
It was the first critique I’ve read on written agreements. More from Rich:
I think a group is held together by history and relationships and collaborative meaning-making and amorous feelings and psychological responses and co-imagined futures and shared identity, and yes some written agreements and explicit roles too, but I’m convinced the explicit stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.
Good vibes have more impact on a team’s effectiveness than written agreements? Blasphemy! But the more I reflected on it, the more I believed it.
Good vibes and freestyle dance
I used to be an active breakdancer. I competed regularly with a crew. I practiced every day. All I thought about was breaking.
In 2010, I chose UC Irvine as the college I wanted to go to. UC Irvine’s freestyle dance club was notorious for being vibrant, open, and fun.
I loved the vibe of BBA so much. I became President of the club in 2013.
We were great dancers, but amateur organization designers:
Our weekly team meetings lasted hours (this was before I started a Real Job and learned how to actually facilitate ok)
We made money by selling our version Crunch Wraps for $5 on campus
We kept our money in a cash box in someone’s apartment
And we certainly didn’t document working agreements the way I do with my teams now.
But BBA was always good vibes.
Freestyle dancers feed off of good vibes. Our reputation at UC Irvine was good vibes. Our 100-1000 person jams (events) were always good vibes:
We didn’t document working agreements, but BBA was all about good vibes. And that showed in our passion for dance and openness to teaching others.
Sanctuary is good vibes too
Sanctuary is big on documenting information so that anyone can pull the info they need to do their work. But we weren’t always this big on it.
When I first started at Sanctuary in August 2019, I noticed that teams craved more documentation. Team contributors sought out key project info from their project leads, which created dependencies on project leads. We found an opportunity for information to flow more quickly so that teams could work more quickly. (Our documentation habit drastically picked up when we started remote work when COVID broke out.)
But back to 2019. I also noticed a strong sense of togetherness. Everyone genuinely likes each other. People are more than willing to hang outside of work. Good vibes were (and still are) all around.
It reminded me of the good vibes I felt at BBA.
As Rich said, “history and relationships and collaborative meaning-making and amorous feelings and psychological responses and co-imagined futures and shared identity” held (and still holds) us together.
Written agreements don’t impact togetherness as much as the vibe. It’s more about what the agreements mean rather than what they actually say.
Vibes emerge when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
“Did you text the group chat?”
“Let’s do another group hang.”
“I’ll check with the team and see what they say.”
If you find yourself saying things like this with your friends, your friend group has a vibe.
A tight-knit group puts priority on the group rather than the individual.
The good folks at Other Internet put it well in Squad Wealth:
…the squad is more than a loose network of affiliations, it's a coherent body. A second prerequisite of squad formation is self-recognition. It's not you or me. It's Us. We. Ours. This pillar often follows from the first. Squads may start as one-off Telegram channels, but they soon become "The Group Chat," a metonym for the squad itself.
To say that “we’re vibin’” is to acknowledge that there is something greater than the sum of all the individuals in the group. Vibes are the mutual feeling that emerges as a result of us being together.
Are positive vibes different from psychological safety?
Now don’t get me wrong. Vibes and psychological safety—the feeling that there is zero consequence from sharing your true opinions with a group—aren’t the same thing.
I’ve been part of groups that have good vibes but no psychological safety. Everyone cared about maintaining harmony, even over saying the hard thing. We were afraid to disagree or give feedback because we didn’t want to disrupt our harmony.
I’ve also been a part of teams where the vibe wasn’t exactly positive, but there was high psychological safety. We weren’t afraid to disagree with each other. We welcomed different perspectives.
Of course, good vibes and psychological safety aren’t mutually exclusive. But I think it’s important to foster both. Give me good vibes and psychological safety. Good vibes keep groups together; psychological safety helps groups solve hard problems.
Reflection
What team were you a part of that had bad vibes? What factors led to those bad vibes?
What team were you a part of that always had a good vibe? What factors led to those good vibes?
What I’m Reading
Reading Yvon Chounard’s Let My People Go Surfing. Currently rocking my world.
Sahil Lavingia on how Gumroad has no meetings, no deadlines, and no full-time employees.
Inside The Ready: a self-managing consultancy and future of work laboratory.
My colleague Jacob Heftmann wrote about his philosophies behind building XXIX.
A structured approach to learning. Fewer approvals. More autonomy. More willing ad hoc collaboration. And yes, laughter. These are signs that your team is vibin’.
See you in two weeks,
–tim
I like vibes but I don't trust them to do the hard work.
Too many times I've seen teams running on good vibes being crushed by their own naivete.
There's always that one stakeholder or that one manager that's not in sync with "the vibes" and ruins the day.
Another thing — for sure it's cultural, I'm Italian and Italian people just love to talk over and over and over again: good vibes only lead to a lot of talk and absolutely nothing is being written down - either working agreements or tech docs.
I continuously observe company cultures where nobody writes anything down ever, the larger the company, the worse it gets – which is counter-intuitive: one would expect a smaller company to run wild with no docs, and bigger companies to document everything, well that's not the case for me, I've seen far more smaller companies being disciplined about it than bigger ones.
So there can be vibes AND working agreements, I don't see the two being mutually exclusive.