Hard to Disband

This'll be a short one, I think. Something about having too many high-stakes external meetings and shifting of my lifestyle from fully sedentary to something that has activity is driving my body/brain insane from the endeavour.

Oh, and reading Michael Pollan's A World Appears too.

Anyway, a thought did come to mind during one of the many down times during the work day known as lunch---it is often much easier to form a team to achieve a mission than to stand the team down once the mission is accomplished. As a corollary to that, the lack of an off-boarding process to stand down the team ends up with scope creep to the point that it may even go against the original mission in the first place.

The point of discussion that led to this epiphany was on feminism, where a place with stronger cultural predilections towards enforcing old customs that are traditionally not about equal rights tend to see feminism as a good thing, and where the more developed liberal societies start seeing feminism as a form of a superiority complex.

Spoiler: both movements call themselves ``feminism'', but they are wholly different animals altogether. I call the first one ``primal feminism'', and the second one ``post-modern feminism''. My hypothesis is that primal feminism exists to correct the wrongs with respect to inequal rights at the gender level, but once that goal is achieved (should the goalposts not be shifted), the ensuing massed people do not undergo the ``correct'' step of disbandment, but start to find new things from which they can use their new-found power to change. And there are always the vocal few who bring their own agenda to bear, and use this power to advance their own agenda in that scope creep sort of way. Hence there's this ``sudden'' movement from equal rights in the scope of gender, to something akin to supremacy leanings, where the weaker gender must overpower the ``stronger'' gender as a way of retribution/``restitution''/``lesson learning''. It may not involve violence (in which case it would be militant), but it can definitely have leanings that would violate what a reasonable person might expect.

The objective here isn't about vilifying feminism, but to use that discussion context to talk about the epiphany I highlighted earlier---that it is much easier to create a new team to do something than it is to disband an old one. Part of the mechanical reason is about this weird obsession of combatting entropy---we usually prefer order over disorder, and under this lens, disbandment is considered a reversion to disorder. Emotionally, disbandment also evokes that sense of loss that most people strive to avoid as well, as it is a movement from the known and familiar back to the state of the alone and unfamiliar.

Even Tucker, the dude who came up with the life cycle of team development, had to eventually add the last step of ``Adjourning'' to his famous Forming→Storming→Norming→Performing stage taglines. And I would go as far as to say that it is normal, especially if the teams are constructed for the purposes of a mission/project.

Recall that a mission has objectives to be met, and a project has specific outcomes to be delivered, and most importantly, they all have a targetted end state beyond which they are done. If the existential reason for a team (i.e. the project/mission) is over due to completion of the project/mission, then there is no reason for the team to continue to be massed---they must be allowed to disband, with the members reassigned to where they are needed.

Now, a word of caution. In much of my professional life, I have been part of project teams, not functional ones. The difference between a project team and a functional team is that the latter serves as an organ of an organisation, i.e. they have recurring tasks that needs to be done, and those span the life time of the organisation, as opposed to the projects where the task has a time-limit with almost no recurrence. That said, ``recurrence'' is used strictly in the sense of ``wholly repeating with little to no change between iterations of it''.

There are some project teams I was on where the projects themselves have been reconfigured into various variants with a sense of re-occurrence, but they are not functional as in being an organ of the organisation. For personnel growth, I prefer to operate like a functional team while being under the mandate of the project, but that is more of a useful illusion than reality.

The bigger picture here is more related to the organisation than at my managerial level---I would claim that it is the duty of the organisation to think about the manpower of project teams post the end of the project than it is for the project lead/manager, and that if there is no intention of having them be involved in a new project, or transferred into a functional role, then the messaging should be made clear. None of all these ``we value you as a part of the organisation'' crap while leaving people's fates in the balance. Yes, it may be harder to tell someone that their time with the organisation is up when the project (and their contract, if tied to the project) is done, but at least no one is being strung along in limbo finding ways to ``justify their reason of existence'' to the senior management of the organisation.

And if the senior management of the organisation cannot figure out what to do, then they have failed at their fundamental role as senior managers. Line managers like my current role are just glorified foot soldiers advancing the agenda of the organisation, whose guiding lights are the senior management---we are definitely not the senior management, nor do we have the responsibility nor the accountability of the senior management. We can assist with information gathering, but the final decision of what the hell the organisation needs should always come from the big picture.

Because these organisations aren't grassroots ones---they are corporation-types, and that has always been top-down from the governance perspective.

Tirade against senior management aside, even in regular life, it is normal to feel bad when a team of any sort needs to disband. I see this when thinking about the people whom I have lost touch---it feels bad because it the loss of touch triggers the same emotional responses as the loss of a team member.

But such is life.