A story of how a forgotten Soviet craft became a team’s quiet rallying point—exploring identity, culture, and the small things that make teams truly cohesive.
I don’t remember exactly how it started.
At the time, I was leading a team building vehicle middleware for a AAA games company. We were a small, newly formed group tackling big, ambitious challenges. In a company with well-established teams and clear mandates, we were the outliers. There was no predefined role for us, no established roadmap.
And yet—we believed in what we were doing.
We had a vision and knew how we wanted to execute it. Even if the odds weren’t in our favour, even if we had to fight to carve out our space, we had an unshakable sense of purpose. We weren’t just another department—we were something unconventional, experimental, a little bit rogue.
In that mix of determination and absurdity, I started talking about a vehicle.
It didn’t work. It was broken. It was rusting on a dock hundreds of miles away—a Soviet-era relic, a machine of pure audacity that never truly found its place… but it was awesome.
The Lun-class Ekranoplan.
It was a craft that had no business existing, but somehow, no one got the memo. Designed to skim just above the waves, too fast for radar detection, it was an experiment in military dominance. Not a plane, not a boat, but something entirely new. Yet, history moved on without it. It was too different, too bold, too strange to fit neatly into any doctrine.
And yet—it was inspiring.
Because success isn’t always about longevity, sometimes, it’s about having the audacity to try something different, to challenge expectations, to win hearts and minds, and to refuse to be ordinary.
That’s partly why it became the odd metaphor for our team.
Not because we were destined to be abandoned like it was or short-lived – the team continues to this day. But because we, too, were operating outside the norm. We weren’t just executing a standard playbook. We had to believe in what we were doing, even when others didn’t quite know what to make of us. We had to adapt, move fast, and prove ourselves unconventionally.
And before I even realized it, the Ekranoplan became part of our culture.
It was a joke, a rallying point, a way to say, yes, this is hard, yes, it’s different—but we’re doing it anyway.
It became part of the new team onboarding.
When someone joined the team, they weren’t just introduced to the project or the tools—they were introduced to the Ekranoplan. Not as a prize for fitting in, but as an invitation to be in on the joke. We wanted an actual, the actual, Lun-class Ekranoplan. It was definitely a fixer-upper, but it would one day be ours. Because how could it not be?
Because this wasn’t just a team.
It was something you belonged to.
How It Became a Team Symbol
At first, the Ekranoplan was just something I mentioned in passing. A vehicle that didn’t quite fit into the world it was built for, ambitious but out of place. It seemed fitting for what we were trying to do.
It wasn’t planned, but it stuck. Over time, it became a quiet reference point, a way to express things that didn’t need explaining.
The team wasn’t following an established path; it was operating in its own space, finding ways to stay relevant, make an impact, and justify its existence, often against expectations. The Ekranoplan captured something about that, even if no one said it directly.
A shared reference like this does something to a team. It creates an internal language, a sense of identity that isn’t about job titles or project milestones but about a way of thinking. It’s a marker of belonging.
This kind of shared myth is more than just an in-joke. It protects space for non-transactional interactions, for conversations that aren’t just about tasks but about the team itself. It gives people a way to connect outside the mechanics of work.
And when pressure mounted, when we needed to justify ourselves or find unconventional solutions, the Ekranoplan often reappeared—sometimes as a joke, sometimes as a reminder that we thrived outside convention. It was more than a reference; it became a quiet reinforcement of our mindset.
For us, that space was filled by a Cold War relic left to rust. For someone else, it might be something completely different.
The Role of Absurdity in Team Culture
A team isn’t just a collection of people working on the same problem—it’s a system of shared understandings. The best teams develop their own ways of thinking, their own shorthand, and their own unwritten rules that separate “us” from “everyone else.”
That kind of identity doesn’t come from official mission statements. It comes from the small, unplanned things—the running jokes, the knowing glances, the shared references that seem meaningless to outsiders but define the culture from the inside.
Teams that lack this feel different. Work becomes purely functional, and interactions shrink to efficiency and execution. There’s no room for the small things that build trust. Purely functional teams are brittle. They might work for a while, but don’t expect them to be resilient when things get difficult.
How to Recreate This Magic
You can’t manufacture something like the Ekranoplan. I mean, you can. Unbelievably, Project 903 was literally manufactured. But the idea within our team and the impact it had. If we had tried to force it—if we had called a meeting to discuss “team culture” and deliberately assigned a metaphor—it would have fallen flat.
Things like this emerge organically but don’t emerge in a vacuum.
For a team to develop its own shared identity, there needs to be room for the unnecessary. If every conversation is purely functional, if every interaction is about progress updates and tasks, there’s no space for the offhand comments, the small jokes, the subtle signals that a team is more than just a group of people working on the same thing.
That doesn’t mean trying to be funny or setting up forced social time. It means allowing breathing room in the way a team communicates. It means noticing the things people naturally latch onto and letting them grow without stamping them out in the name of efficiency. The role of leadership. is to protect that space.
And it’s important to recognise that this kind of shared culture isn’t about exclusion. The Ekranoplan wasn’t a way to keep people out; it was a way to bring people in. When new team members were let in on it, it was never a test or a barrier—it was an invitation. A quiet way of saying: You’re part of this now.
What’s Your Ekranoplan?
Most teams never set out to build a shared mythology. But the best ones always seem to have one.
For us, it was an abandoned experimental aircraft. For someone else, it might be something completely different.
Maybe that’s worth noticing.1
And if I ever win the lottery, I won’t tell anyone. But there will be signs.
