are you building a house or hosting a house party?

made w/ midjourney

Homebuilding calls for clear specs and standardization, with tight coordination among your different specialists. In a literal sense, you have to ensure that the floor is level and free of holes. In a figurative sense, you set a floor of performance — a baseline degree of safety and code compliance that make the house viable. As the leader, you set the specific terms of creation.

With a house party, you’re bringing together a group of people to achieve something that may be far less sharply defined. You want a vibe or an experience or a memory to precipitate from this gathering. Each of those might be more satisfying to you, as host, and to your guests, if it emerges as a surprise rather than an engineered output. As the host, you set the conditions for serendipitous magic to occur.

Excellent work can occur in either mode. Different teams default to one or the other for good reasons. And exceptional teams can take on the alternate mode when the situation calls for it. Your team of engineers might literally be planning a party to celebrate a colleague or recent accomplishment. Your loosely bound team of creatives may need to snap into tight sync for response to a crisis.

In both modes, the leader-host looks into the future, sees an excellent outcome and intervenes now to set the team on the path to that outcome.

-eric