I’ve been thinking about inertia a lot recently, specifically the inertia of teams. Inertia is defined by Sir Issac Newton’s First Law of Motion as, roughly speaking, the tendency of objects to either stay still or continue moving unless acted upon by an external force. In other words, inertia is how difficult it is to change something’s direction.

Inertia, with respect to a team, takes a more subtle form when compared to that of a speeding train. Team inertia or Operational Inertia is the tendency for a team to remain on its current path and to maintain the status quo. Any attempt to deviate from the status quo takes an enormous amount of energy even if the status quo is more difficult to execute than the proposed alternative.

Quantifying Inertial Mass

For a physical object, its inertial mass is simply the amount of “stuff” it’s made of. A boy with twice the mass of his friend has twice the inertia. Simple enough. How then, if we are to continue with the analogy, can we quantify the inertial mass of a team? What makes some teams resistant to change where others thrive on it? I imagine there to be a limitless number of factors that contribute to a team’s inertia but I have identified just a few:

Power Imbalance

When power and authority are concentrated within a team, operational inertia goes up. Changes to a team’s plan of action or operational procedures are a risky business and when you concentrate authority, you concentrate the sense of risk. Spreading the decision-making process over the whole team will reduce the risk felt by individuals and thus reduce the inertia caused by fear.

Additionally, if authority and presumably ownership of the team’s current project is concentrated in one place, then so to are the incentives to improve. By spreading the risk of decision making, you are also spreading the ownership of the endeavor which makes it more likely for a team member to speak up in the first place with any ideas or concerns. Team dialogue reduces inertia.

Insufficient Goal Setting

One of the hallmarks of a team with high inertia is a “good enough” culture. If approach X worked the last five times we tried this, the logic goes, then common sense would suggest it will give acceptable results the next five times also. This definition of “acceptable results” is what increases a team’s inertia. Teams must innovate on their ideas and processes because innovation scales and if you want to innovate, a sure way to do that is to set ever-advancing goals. Goals shouldn’t encourage innovation they must require it.

Haste, Not Speed

Another kind of inertia is that of momentum. A speeding train has far more inertia (in the direction of travel) than a stationary one. So imagine a team, single-minded in its approach, barreling towards its perceived goal. They’ve done this many times before and the result was always “good enough” so no one is worried about the project timeline, in fact, they might be ahead of schedule.

When was the last time they stopped to check if everything was okay? Have they stopped even once to discuss what they’re doing as a team? This is haste, not speed.

Stopping a team in mid-flow is a difficult thing to do. They are completing sticky notes/Trello cards/index cards faster than you’ve ever seen, this is hyper-productivity. Unfortunately, like a ship in the open ocean, they may have veered off course without noticing and now we are all hundreds of miles from shore. Take time, regularly, to check in with everybody and ensure a common alignment of purpose within the team and beyond it. It will be the best thing you can do to reduce the inertia of your team.

Conclusion

The opposite of inertia is agility. Agile thinking has dominated the landscape of software development for the last twenty years but being agile (small A) is about more than shallow stand-ups and Trello cards. Being agile is fundamentally about changing direction often, even if only minutely, to ensure clarity of focus and pin point accuracy in the long run.

Steven Poulton is the technical lead of an exciting digital agency in Manchester, England called mobedia. In his spare time he likes to make indie music, make indie games and play with his indie cats.