Crystal Clear A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams

Chapter 1. Explained (View from the Outside)

I distilled Crystal Clear by asking successful small teams what they would keep or change in the ways they worked. They responded with this deceptively simple set of rules. This chapter is written as an e-mail exchange between the fictitious Crystal and me. The e-mails let you encounter the rules from the outside, as I first did, and allow me to push back against Crystal's reports by asking questions.

The following e-mails are written to simulate what it is like to encounter for the first time a team doing Crystal Clear. While writing, I discovered that it was better to write as though Crystal were the one doing the project interviews and teaching Alistair-the-author, even though in real life Alistair ...