Alternatives to Disagree and Commit
In the last issue I talked about the benefits of the principle “disagree and commit.” A big part of that is fostering a healthy and honest debate, the disagree part, which is something I both value and enjoy. So it was fun to immediately run into some differing points of view on “disagree and commit.”
My husband worked for several years at Intel, which had a deeply ingrained disagree and commit culture. He told me about something he’d recently read about Steve Jobs. Jobs’s preference was was to seek consensus from the people who were core to the decision. He didn’t think it was good to have key people just going along with a decision they didn’t agree with. Here’s a good summary of his point of view, or at least his point of view at that time. (I recommend you watch the short video and skip the article; it’s better in Steve’s own words.) Notice that Jobs also says frankly that if someone was consistently out of sync with the direction the team was going, he’d know he had to let them go.
I very much agree with what Jobs says about how you want the smart people to tell you where to go. I want the team to bring their best ideas. As a leader, as the scope of my job increased, for any given thing, there were probably people who knew far more than I did. We needed to know their ideas and critiques out on the table before making a decision in their area of expertise. This is a big part of the “disagree” phase. The point isn’t to disagree, that’s just shorthand for getting getting all the information and opinions out in the open.
Molly Graham, whom I admire a great deal, also happened to write about this recently in her article, “Disagree and Let’s See.” I actually get Molly’s newsletter but it gets filed to a folder for reading later and I hadn’t seen or read it yet when I wrote my article.* Doh! Fortunately, Jade Rubick pointed it out on LinkedIn and so I read it after I’d already published my article. Here’s a short and free version of Molly’s take on LinkedIn. (The full article is pay-walled, but if you sign up for her free newsletter, you’ll get future articles sent directly to you. She only paywalls her archives. If you like my newsletter, you’ll probably like hers, especially if you’re working at startups.)
I really like Molly’s suggestion to look at decisions as experiments. First, being able to articulate what you want a decision to achieve and how you’ll know it’s working is worthwhile in and of itself. It leads to better decisions because it forces clarity, and it often ends up building alignment along the way because it reduces misunderstandings.
Second, it sets up guidelines for revisiting the decision. In my article, I recommended that you explicitly state what conditions would allow someone to legitimately ask to revisit the decision. This is a shortcut version of Molly’s experiment-based model.
There’s an old joke that a consultant’s answer to any hard question is, “it depends.” And like many jokes, there’s truth in it. Should you seek consensus, disagree and let’s see, or disagree and commit? Not all decisions have the same weight. Most are easy to reverse, a few are difficult. Some have a very large downside if wrong, others have a small or moderate downside. Some give early indicators of success, others take longer to play out. Knowing what approach to take is another reason that leadership is hard. But being explicit about the approach you’re taking and why, and including people in the discussion about the decision process itself, will serve you well.
Your Dot Release: Be your own consultant! The next time your team needs to make a decision, consider what the right approach should be: disagree and let’s see, seek a consensus, or disagree and commit? Talk to the team about it and get their perspectives, then pick an approach. Throw a reminder on your calendar at an appropriate time to check back in and see how that worked out.
*I’m still trying to find the right process for keeping up with the newsletters I value. I recently tried adding a rule to file them and then a recurring task to read them, but it didn’t work. As a newsletter author, I should do better, don’t you think? Do you have any suggestions? Reply to this email or drop a comment on the article. Thanks!
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