Disagree and Commit to Encourage Debate and Make Decisions that Stick
Teams encounter two very common problems when they’re making a decision. The first is that they have a culture that is too nice, or too hierarchical, to have a healthy debate. When this happens, people don’t point out problems, share knowledge, or hammer out ways to mitigate risks. You don't get the advantage of all the smart brains on your team.
The second problem is that the decision doesn’t stick. Decisions are revisited endlessly, they are subtly undermined by passive aggressive behavior, or they are just subject to complete end runs.
One way to counter both of these problems is to build a practice of Disagree and Commit.
The premise of Disagree and Commit is that you freely debate solutions to a problem, or a new idea, in order to hammer out its pros and cons. You do this in a debate focused on the ideas. It’s not personal. Once a decision is made, everyone commits to supporting the decision. They will not ask to revisit it unless circumstances change, like say a new fact is discovered, or an external factor changes.
They also will not subvert the idea with snarky or passive aggressive comments. We’ve all seen this: “Well, I don’t think this will work, but that’s the decision, so we’re stuck with it.” It’s an especially bad failure mode for bosses, when a decision is made that they disagreed with and they pass on their disagreement in perpetuity to their teams. “I thought we should use AWS, but they picked Azure, and now everything is going to suck.” No, there was a debate, there were pros and cons and a decision was made. Your role as a leader is to help the team thrive with this decision.*
This practice makes a lot of sense if you’re building a culture where you need to make good-enough decisions quickly. The disagree part encourages people to speak up, to debate the merits of ideas and propose alternatives. The commit part encourages alignment after a decision has been made. Alignment enables speed. In fact, I first learned about Disagree and Commit when I was designing and building fabs for a very successful, and fast moving, Intel. (Yeah, it was the 90’s.) Disagree and Commit enabled us to move through decisions quickly, a necessity for a fast moving and intensely complicated project.
A leadership team I worked with several years later adopted their own form of this. They called it “Disagree, decide, and commit.” It was a new concept to the team, so making the decision step explicit helped everyone understand and adopt this new working agreement.
One of the things I like about Disagree and Commit for technical teams is that it explicitly encourages a good debate. Healthy debate leads to better decisions, but there are lot of cultural and personal reasons people avoid it. By saying “Ok, this is the part of the process where we’re going to disagree” you make it easier for people to do the right thing and speak up with their questions, concerns, and different experiences.
As I say all, the time, smart people disagree, and that’s OK. What’s not OK is getting stuck with no decisions, or multiple decisions, or decisions that don’t last five minutes once the meeting is over. Whatever you call it, your team probably needs a version of Disagree and Commit.
Your Dot Release: The next time your team makes a tough decision, ask them to commit to it. Specifically, establish:
- what the decision is
- what commitment means for this team
- what conditions would allow someone to legitimately ask to revisit the decision
A little bit of time up front will save you from a lot of potential swirl and confusion later!
*Like everything there are edge case exceptions to this, usually when your core values and ethics are on the opposite side of the decision. But before you subvert a decision look into your heart about whether this is really an ethical issue or just a battle that you lost and need to move on.
This post is one in a series on Hard Conversations.
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