The “Lucky Lotto” method for building resilient teams

Daniel Lebrero: First thing Monday, a random person on the team is designated as the “Lucky Lotto” winner.

“‘You won the Lotto’ sounds better than ‘You were run over by a bus’.”

The Lucky Lotto winner is, theoretically, completely unavailable to colleagues all week; they work on side-projects. Every time the unavailability rule is broken — because the Lucky Lotto winner proves essential to a project — the Lucky Lotto winner makes notes and brings a colleague along to teach that colleague the essential skill.