“We talk about, oh, AI is going to be like this enabler of super performance for teams. We already have it. It's just a good team. A good team is super intelligent. … The teams that actually spend a bit of time getting their shit together up front, they end up delivering. … Everything about it is better and it is free. Teaming is free.”

Finding Our Way · User Experience · October 2026

Asked about the common pushback that writing team charters slows people down, the org designer says he offers a contest: one team works as usual, another sets up its purpose and working agreements first. He says the second team wins by outlandish margins.

Finding Our Way · 2026-10-24 Listen to the episode → More from Clay Parker Jones → More User Experience quotes →

Transcript

Finding Our Way Around 34:23 into the episode

Clay Parker Jones

Very common pushback. Yes. Why don't we just get started? Why don't we just do the work? Yeah,

Peter Merholz

why do we need a charter? We know what we're doing, right?

Clay Parker Jones

Yeah. Yeah. I will usually have basically a contest. You take one of your teams and you keep doing your thing. Give me another team and let me show you what they can do. And the numbers are, they tend to be outlandish. We talk about, oh, AI is going to be like this enabler of super performance for teams. We already have it. It's just a good team. A good team is super intelligent. We've all experienced in the best teams that we've worked on this feeling of a hive mind. That's what we're going for here. So let's just do that. Let's just do that more frequently. And what I find is over and over, the teams that actually spend a bit of time getting their shit together up front, they end up delivering. Whether that getting their shit together is writing it down or whether it's…

Peter Merholz

I'm curious then, because I agree. And I think org designers can be a bit like Cassandra's. We're just shouting truths that no one is hearing. But I'm wondering what you make of the resistance to it, right? In a world that claims to be data-driven or evidence-driven, why so many decisions are being…

Clay Parker Jones

I mean, I have dumb answers to that mostly. And they're like, look at the world around us. You have to believe in state capacity and institutions and people and the fundamental goodness of people. And you have to believe that people want to get more done. You know, you have to believe that the road…

Jesse James Garrett

maybe just a touch of optimism can get people through

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from Finding Our Way

“Don't convince people. Don't try. Just offer the thing, offer the better way of doing something, offer the better design, offer the better practice. And if they don't want to do it, they probably have a good reason. And trying to trick them into doing it is not worth your time.” — Clay Parker Jones, Finding Our Way

“In large organizations, so much of the conversation ends up being about, oh, well, we don't have role clarity. And it's something people say when they are trying not exactly to avoid taking action, but it often allows people to do that.” — Clay Parker Jones, Finding Our Way