Yes, painting the bike shed is a wonderuful phrase I’ve learned about workplace communities while watching How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People during my lunch hour.

“Painting the Bike Shed” comes from this scenario: a group of workers are building a nuclear power plant. They also decide that they want a little shack to keep their bikes out of the rain while they’re at work. The discussion on what color to paint the bike shed takes monumentally more time than the discussion about how to build the power plant. So there’s an inverse relationship between the importance of the task and the amount of discussion involved. You see this phenomenon in every workplace in America.

Another great phrase? “The Bus Factor” is the number of folks that have to get hit by a bus in order for an organization to be up the creek sans paddle. How many organizations do you know who have a bus factor of one? (i.e., If the president or CEO is hit by the bus, then the work is dead, the organization can’t function.) Now the bus factor doesn’t have to involve being hit by a bus. It could be a new job offer, a new baby, or another shift in life. This sort of change shouldn’t be enough to kill an organization, but sometimes it does.

How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (and You Can Too) is one of the most helpful videos I’ve seen about workplace dynamics and how to encourage healthy creative communities, particularly when you deal with volunteers. Some of it is specific to open sourcing, but most of it is not. Honestly, much of it seemed appropriate to ministry, non-profit work, as well as corporate working environments. Please watch it, and in a pinch, read notes about it here.