Reflective text Q3’26

The View From Above

I was sitting in a café in Tampere once, somewhere high up on the 25th floor, looking down at the streets below. From that height, everything looked different. The cars looked tiny, and people were moving in all directions, some stopping, some turning, some crossing the street. Some were probably rushing somewhere while others had nowhere urgent to be. Up close it would have looked chaotic, but from above it worked as one system. What stayed with me was how all those separate people were still part of the same movement, almost unconsciously working together like a team to keep each other safe and get from point A to point B.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised how strange that actually is. When you are behind the wheel, you are responsible for your own car and your own choices. You have your own destination, your own speed, and your own decisions to make, and nobody else is holding the steering wheel for you. But almost every move you make depends on the people around you. You can change lanes, but only after checking that someone is not already there. You can speed up, slow down, or take a different turn, but you are constantly adjusting to what everyone else is doing. If you stop paying attention to the people around you and focus only on where you want to go, sooner or later you are going to crash into someone.

Teamwork works in a similar way. You are still your own person with your own goals and way of doing things, but once you are part of a team, you are no longer moving alone. Even when you think you are only deciding something for yourself, someone else may have to adjust because of it.

What struck me most from up there was that I could see something no driver could: the pattern. Each driver sees only their own lane, the car in front, the mirror behind. Nobody inside the system sees the whole system. That is the real difficulty of working in a team, and it is what this reflection is about: how do you understand a pattern you are part of when all you can see is your own lane?

When I think about the beginning of Averi, I imagine a group of drivers who had just been handed cars and sent into traffic without an instructor. We did not know the rules yet, so we learned them while already on the road. Some of us moved cautiously, some wanted to go fast, and some were still figuring out where they wanted to go.

Then I came across Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt (2008), which explores the psychology and behaviour behind driving. One idea stayed with me: a disturbance in traffic can create a wave that travels backwards through the line of cars. A driver slows down, the person behind reacts, then the person behind them reacts, and the effect continues. By the time someone reaches the traffic jam, whatever originally caused it may already be long gone (Vanderbilt, 2008).

A team can work the same way. A plan changed without telling anyone, or a task everyone assumed someone else had picked up, rarely stays where it started. It travels through the team as extra work, small frustrations, and people double-checking things they used to trust. I see this in Averi even in very ordinary things. One person leaves one cup on a windowsill, assuming somebody will move it later. For one person, one cup is insignificant. But when ten people make the same harmless decision, the windowsills are full, the sink is full, and somebody else has to deal with it. Nobody decided to create a mess. The mess is what appears when many small decisions form a pattern.

So why do some patterns become so difficult to change? The idea that helped me think about this came from John Nash, the mathematician whose life later inspired A Beautiful Mind. Nash’s work on non-cooperative games describes situations in which each person’s strategy depends on what everyone else is doing. In a Nash equilibrium, nobody has an incentive to change their strategy alone if everyone else’s strategy stays the same (Nash, 1951).

The uncomfortable part is that an equilibrium does not have to produce a good outcome. Imagine a team where everyone assumes someone else will pick up the loose task. If you are the one who always steps in, you carry the extra work while everyone else learns that somebody will eventually rescue the situation. Waiting can slowly become the sensible response, and the norm survives even though nobody particularly likes it and nobody consciously chooses it.

It made me think that culture may be less about what people say they believe and more about what people have learned to respond to. We can say we value responsibility, initiative, and trust, but the real culture appears in what happens when something is forgotten or nobody knows who owns it. This is also why blaming the person who seems to be causing the problem can make us misunderstand the bigger picture. The individual is still responsible, but focusing only on them can make us miss the pattern around them.

Averi’s finances show this clearly. When a payment is missed, the consequence does not stay with the person who missed it. Someone has to notice it, go back through the numbers, work out what is missing, follow up, and check again later. One unfinished responsibility creates work for several people, and when it happens repeatedly, everyone starts verifying things they once trusted were done. That is another wave travelling backwards.

What helped was not simply telling people to be more responsible. We started making missing responsibilities visible, reminding people clearly, and setting expectations for when things needed to be handled. The individual still has to act, but the road around them becomes easier to read. It made me realise that sometimes improving responsibility is not only about changing people. It is also about creating a system in which the responsible choice is clearer and easier to make.

If bad norms can become that stable, how does a team escape them? Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation gave me another way to think about this. Axelrod organised computer tournaments in which different strategies repeatedly played the Prisoner’s Dilemma against one another. One of the most successful strategies, Tit for Tat, was remarkably simple: begin by cooperating and then respond to what the other player did in the previous round. It did not defect first, it responded when the other player stopped cooperating, and it was able to return to cooperation afterwards (Axelrod, 1984).

What interested me even more was Axelrod’s argument that cooperation does not necessarily require everyone to change at once. Cooperation can begin among a smaller group of individuals who repeatedly interact and reciprocate one another’s behaviour. If that pattern works, it has the possibility to survive and spread (Axelrod, 1984). That feels much closer to how change actually happens in a team. Nobody has to vote for a completely new culture overnight. A few people begin doing something differently, others notice that it works, and slowly it stops feeling unusual.

I think we have seen that in Averi. Saying early that you cannot take something on makes a surprisingly big difference. “I cannot do this right now” gives everyone else information they can respond to, while saying yes and then disappearing creates another wave. When a few people communicate their capacity honestly, it becomes easier for others to do the same. Eventually something that started as an individual choice can become part of how the team operates.

Axelrod’s work also made me think differently about frustration. It is tempting to think that when someone falls out of rhythm, the best response is to stop paying attention to them, because compensating, getting frustrated, and keeping score can pull everyone’s attention away from the road. But cooperation does not mean ignoring what other people do. It means responding to their behaviour without allowing one bad interaction to determine every interaction that follows.

That matters in a real team because we rarely know exactly why somebody made a mistake. What looks like carelessness could be a misunderstanding. What looks like low commitment could be a bad week. What looks deliberate could simply come from missing information. If every mistake is answered as if it were intentional, people start reacting to each other’s reactions until nobody even remembers where the conflict began. One person tapped the brakes, and twenty cars later everybody is standing still.

Forgiveness does not mean pretending nothing happened or endlessly carrying someone else’s responsibilities. To me, it means giving the system a chance to reset. You can say clearly that something did not work, expect something different next time, and still allow the next interaction to begin differently. Otherwise yesterday’s mistake becomes today’s expectation, and today’s expectation starts shaping tomorrow’s behaviour.

This brings me back to the 25th floor. From up there, I could see patterns that none of the people inside the traffic could see. Inside Averi, none of us gets to stand above the system permanently, which is why we need moments where we deliberately climb above it, whether in a paja, a difficult conversation, or simply through someone saying, “I think we have started doing this without noticing.” Naming a pattern is the first step towards changing it, because it is very difficult to choose differently when nobody can see what has become normal.

A team does not change because everyone suddenly becomes a better person, and it does not change by fixing the one person who is out of rhythm. It changes through hundreds of small decisions that others see, respond to, and eventually repeat. Maybe the more useful question when something goes wrong is not immediately, “Who caused this?” but, “What have we all been responding to that allowed this pattern to form?”

We may never see Averi as clearly as I saw Tampere from that window, because we are inside it. But we can occasionally stop looking only at the car in front of us and ask what kind of traffic we are creating together.