The Swedish leap

There is a very specific type of project that I’ve observed and occasionally participated in that I haven’t seen described or documented frequently. For lack of a better name I’ll call it the “Swedish leap”, as it to some extent is connected to the Swedish summer vacation culture although it wouldn’t necessarily need to be as most of the enablers could be recreated in any company without having a Swedish vacation culture. Indeed I believe that some of the best companies might purposefully operate in similar ways for selected projects.

To understand it I’ll give a brief background into Swedish summer vacation culture. In most office types of companies it is common (at least in Sweden) that vacation is freely scheduled by the employees, note that this does not apply to industry type of work where the production line is stopped for a number of weeks and the employees working at that line has mandatory vacation those weeks. In Swedish culture there is a high focus on making the most of the summer, outside a few months of summer we have dark days with cold weather and if it doesn’t snow it rains, but for a few weeks every year the weather is fantastic and this calls for some almost desperate attempts to enjoy and spend some quality time outdoors. This is coupled with generous benefits in terms of minimum vacation and for parents options for maternity/paternity leave. This means the average office is very sparsely populated from mid June until mid August, with July being similar to how you would imagine it after a zombie apocalypse. But there are exceptions of course, people that are newly employed haven’t earned their full vacation time yet and might not want to use “up front vacation days” more than necessary, and some have already used their vacation days and are saving them for some specific occasion. There are also those who simply break the pattern by having their own ways to find time to recover and have a different way to find work life balance.

All-in-all you can expect some offices to be at 10-20% of normal capacity during peak summer, and this changes things. The people that are in the office tend to be younger employees, they tend to be more recently employed at the company, or they are persons that are comfortable operating slightly outside of the norm. If you are not in a very operational setting you also tend to be less stressed out since the amount of external input decreases. Some practicalities are also affected, approval flows change, you have vast amounts of space available. Larger projects that need coordination tend to stall a bit, leaving some head room for other activities and the people that have many years in the company, the ones that tell you “This has been tried before, it will not work.” are always on vacation.

The Swedish leap doesn’t come without preparation and some infrastructure. To make it work you need access to infrastructure resources up front or infrastructure you can provision yourself (ie Cloud stuff). You also need to have spent some time during the spring either identifying and analyzing a specific problem carefully, or perhaps identifying a specific technology that needs to be explored. It’s key that the assignment is very open, if there is a set expectation frustration will be created by lack of access to all the professionals you typically rely on to produce excellent results. A much better target is a prototype or a proof of concept that can then be further refined when all capabilities are back.

I’ve seen the Swedish leap taken several times in several different companies. I’ve seen multiple examples of how a base prototype or a proof of concept developed by the small remnants of teams during the summer vacation later turn into the foundation for entire departments of the company. What those projects lack in technical refinement they make up for in creativity and breadth of experience put into it.

If you have the opportunity to participate in such a project I highly recommend it. I think it is a great opportunity to get some perspective on the modern workplace that has for a long time specialized further and further to the point of people thinking that they can’t do certain things. Working in a Sweish leap is not like what is commonly considered as working on a project in a cross functional team, think of it more as you exploring just how cross functional you can be yourself.