Disconnected

"Trust is something that comes easy / When you've never been a victim" —Face to Face, "Disconnected"

My team is fully remote. My last team ranged from IST (UTC+5:30) to PST (UTC-8). I haven't worked in an office since 2008, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

But remote is a tradeoff. You gain flexibility, autonomy, the ability to do deep work without someone tapping your shoulder. You lose the high-bandwidth connection of being in the same room—the overheard conversation, the hallway question, the implicit awareness of how someone's doing before they tell you.

It means you have to be more intentional about building psychological safety, not less. The things that happen accidentally in an office don't happen at all unless you create the conditions for them.

Standup might be the only synchronous moment all week where we see each other as humans instead of Slack handles. That's a lot of weight for one ceremony to carry.

What Synchronous Time Is For

The point of getting everyone in the same room—even a virtual one—isn't status updates. You can read status off the board. The point is group cohesion. Building the connective tissue that turns a collection of individuals into a team.

Cohesion builds trust. When you see someone's face regularly, hear their voice, watch how they respond under pressure—you start to understand them. You learn who thinks out loud versus who needs time to process. You pick up on when someone's frustrated before they say it. That understanding is the foundation trust is built on.

Trust enables vulnerability. Vulnerability lets someone say "I don't know." or "I think we're wrong" or "I'm stuck and I didn't want to admit it." That's how a team becomes smarter than the individuals—not because anyone has the answer, but because someone is willing to say the thing that unlocks someone else.

"You don't know what you need / something that may never come to you."

You can't surface what you don't know you're missing.

Cohesion is hard to build and easy to destroy.

Constant team churn will do it. Every departure means starting over—new relationships to build, new working styles to learn, new trust to earn. Why invest in understanding someone who might be gone in a few weeks? You learn to hold back. You learn to wait and see. But churn isn't the only thing that corrodes trust.

Ceremonies themselves can do it if the ritual is hollow.

I had a job where standup meant walking the Kanban board. Every ticket, every day, just status updates from everyone. It was tedious. Most of us tuned out, waiting for our turn to recite, then tuning out again. We showed up because it was expected. We checked out the moment it ended.

A hollow ritual is worse than no ritual. It teaches people that showing up doesn't matter. It's just something to endure before the real work starts. Every hollow standup is a withdrawal from the trust account. You can damage a team without ever making a single controversial decision—just by making them participate in something empty.

What I'm Doing (And Not Doing Yet)

I've been running standups differently than the board-walk. "Does anyone have anything?" If the answer is no, we end in two minutes. That was deliberate. I wanted them to know I wasn't going to waste their time with status theater. Respecting their time is a way of giving trust first.

It's still hollow.

Maybe it's working—maybe they're learning I won't waste their time. But nobody's developing the relationships that would make them willing to be vulnerable. I've created space by removing the bad thing, but space doesn't fill itself.

I've been thinking about the Lean Coffee format. Democratized topics—anyone can propose anything to talk about—timeboxed discussion, vote to continue or move on. It preserves the original instinct behind standup—literally standing up, so it doesn't drag out—while creating space for whatever's on people's minds. The topics don't have to be blockers. They just have to matter enough people want to discuss it.

The Problem Underneath

Lies and promises are words said / It's your decision to accept them.

I can propose a better format. I can explain why I think it'll help. But that's just words. They have every reason to wait and see if I'm still here in three months before they invest in whatever I'm selling. Trust is something that comes easy when you've never been a victim, and they have been.

So here's where I am: doing nothing keeps it broken. Hollow rituals keep it broken. I have to try something. Maybe not the full Lean Coffee yet—maybe just one small signal first. A question that invites more than "any blockers?" A topic I bring to see if anyone engages. How do I do this and make it feel authentic?

For Mark

You've been inside organizations, seen rituals work and rituals fail. You've seen what remote does to cohesion—the way distance makes everything harder to build and easier to break.

How do you create connection when everyone's got reasons to disconnect? Is there a ceremony that actually works, or is it all just showing up consistently until people believe you?

You don't know what you want It may take you years to find out You don't know what you need It's something that may never come to you