Managed or messaged

Field note, the same every July.

The person who briefs the outsourced team goes on leave. Three weeks, phone off, or off in the way that matters. The team keeps working, because the contract says so and the calendar says so.

Then one of two things happens, and it happens within the week.

In the first version the work keeps its shape. The report arrives on the same day in the same format. The creative goes out with the same checks on it. A question comes up that the brief did not cover, and somebody looks in the place where the brief lives, finds the answer or finds the rule for when there is no answer, and gets on with it. The manager comes back to a folder, not to a fire.

In the second version the work drifts. Not dramatically. The report comes a day late, then in a slightly different shape. A creative goes out with a claim nobody checked. A question comes up and goes into a chat thread, where it waits for someone who is on a beach, and either dies there or is answered by whoever is loudest. By the time the manager is back the account has quietly become a different account, and nobody can say when.

Which version you get was decided months earlier. It depends on whether the work ran on something written, a process, a checklist, a page that says what good looks like and who decides what, or whether it ran on messages. A team run on messages is run by the person sending them, and it stops when they do.

I have watched this from the platform side through enough summers to treat the leave as the cleanest test there is. A team is not managed because it has a manager. July is when you find out whether it was ever managed, or only messaged.