write a breathless history

If you’ve built a team or organization from scratch and your team has grown quickly, you will know a lot of history that your newest teammates don’t. Important constraints and tradeoffs, several of your hardest bitten bullets, will be obvious to you and invisible or confusing to your people. You see a landscape embroidered with Chesterton fences - they see an unkempt field riddled with stumbling blocks. 

It may be worth an hour of your time to write a breathless history of your organization and share it with your people. In this document, you’re explaining in your own voice how and why the whole thing started and how and why we got to where we are today. No matter how long your thing has been around, you’re going to have to distill a bunch. Zero in on the critical decisions - they have the most explanatory power.

It might feel beside the point, but you can address the very corporate form of your entity. Are you a 501c3; a B Corp; a google group and nothing more? Why? What did that offer you at the time you chose it or fell into it? What does it mean for the constraints you have now?

-Eric