Every startup team has a rhythm, a team swing. 

When a team starts to fall into it’s swing every interaction seems to be surging the company forward in almost an effortless and fun way.

In his book Mind Over Water, rower Craig Lambert describes swing in this way,

Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing…Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself.  The swing carries us; we do not force it.  We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work.  We are not so much swinging as being swung.  The boat swings you.  The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature.  Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster.  Trying too hard sabotages boat speed.  Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself.  Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing.  Aristocrats do not strive, they have already arrived.  Swing is a state of arrival.

No two teams can have the same swing. 

You can be in the same market, with the same product and your team swing will the primary factor in deciding who wins.

So your team could swing like this,

 

Or the same team could swing like this,

 

Either way - you want to staff your startup with people who can swing like you do.

(Note to self: Get copies of Jean-Luc Goddard films. This is brilliant footage.)

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On Wed 10 Jan 2007.