← Reading a Group · lesson 3/3
Once a group's charts are laid together, three questions are worth asking of them. They answer different things, and confusing them is where group readings go wrong.
For any pair you can ask what their charts make together. Three relations are worth distinguishing:
⚠️ A dense pair is not a good relationship and a sparse one is not a bad one. A lot running between two people is intensity — which is as often friction, heat or dependence as it is ease. Very little running between them frequently makes for a comfortable working life. If you describe a pair at all, describe what the connection is, never how well they ought to get on.
Each person reaches clarity in one of a handful of ways: on an emotional tide that takes time; as an immediate gut response; as a single quiet signal that comes once and does not repeat; or by hearing themselves think out loud.
Count them across the group and you learn something a single chart cannot show — how many different speeds are in the room. A group where everyone arrives the same way will agree quickly, and should be considerably more suspicious of that agreement than it will naturally be.
Unlike coverage, this measure genuinely changes shape as membership changes. Add one person whose clarity ripens slowly and deciding in the room becomes wrong for the whole group; remove them and it becomes right again. That is why it is the most useful thing to look at when you are asking who should be in a meeting.
Where exactly one person holds a centre, the group has a single point for whatever that centre governs — new questions, or commitment, or timing.
State this as a fact about the group's shape, and put the remedy with the group rather than the person: write the open questions somewhere shared; notice when a commitment is being felt by one person on everyone's behalf. Framed the other way — as a dependency on an individual — it becomes pressure on someone who did not ask for it and cannot help it.