Asymmetric Decisions

How are you checking the impacts of your decisions within your own organization, let alone on the outside world?

In economics, externalities are costs or benefits that are felt outside of the current system. For example, the drop in property value due to the smell coming from your pig farm.  What there doesn’t seem to be a name for is a pattern I see constantly: costs/benefits that are arguably internal but overlooked, usually because of too narrow a focus.  Please reach out if you know the proper term, but for now I’ll call them “asymmetric decisions”.  Here are a few examples. 

A company fails to retire a legacy product which is still selling but is a bear to maintain.  The benefits (sales and commissions) are felt by the sales force, whose outsized influence means the company is blind to the costs (tech debt, code no one really understands), which are felt intensely by engineering and harder to quantify.

In another scenario, you have a hot new product (good), and you allow high internal mobility (good), but that drains engineers from your cash cow legacy product, weakening those teams (bad).

Another classic is the “we should” impulse: someone brings up an idea, often starting with “we should”.   It might be a great idea, but the gentle pressure of the word “should” and the excitement of novelty brushes aside a discussion of what you will not do, or what you will cancel, to make room for the new work. 

In all three scenarios, if you fail to account for all the costs and benefits, you are driving a decision based on incomplete information, even though it all exists internal to your organization.  I’m guessing an economist would say that it’s always just a matter of perspective, e.g., that engineering costs are an unaddressed negative externality from the perspective of the sales force.  But what interests me is how frequently these asymmetric decisions seem to happen in cases where the different players would likely consider themselves all part of the same larger team.

I think it’s important to consider the impact beyond the company’s interests, but it surprises me how often we fail to even look that far. To overcome this pattern of bias, I recommend trying to take a different perspective in two primary ways:

1. Welcome dissent in the room. Why might we ourselves disagree with this decision? Yes, you’re excited, but pausing to ask this question gives you a chance to avoid getting yourselves into a tight spot.
2. Look for dissent outside the room. Who outside the decision-making group might disagree with this decision, and why? Just imagining their perspective helps, but you can of course also go ask them.

Note: David Marquet’s Leadership is Language and Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets both have some great concrete suggestions for making dissent a painless routine.

Regardless, keep your eyes peeled for these asymmetric decisions. It takes just a tiny bit of reflection to check for such hidden implications, which I’d say is well worth it if you even only catch a big problem a small fraction of the time.

Your Audience is Really Many Audiences

Many years ago, I was directing a play.  During an early rehearsal, two actors were doing great work with a scene, but I wanted to pull their interpretation into a slightly different place.  I gave them some direction, and they tried again.  It felt off, so we had another go, but my direction seemed to be pushing things in weird ways I hadn’t wanted.  As I continued working with them, I started realizing that I couldn’t give a single direction to the two of them about the scene.  They were each in different places, so while a direction might work for one actor, it might steer the other wrong.  As a result, I started giving them certain directions separately.

That experience then reminded me of a moment where I was on the other side of the dynamic.  In acting school years before, a teacher told my class that we had to work harder on preparing our material.  Painfully keen on being the good student, I took it to heart.  And when he repeated this to the class, I went even further.  Weeks later, in private, he told me to relax and stop working so hard.  “Don’t do any homework,” he told me.  I started to protest, “But you told us–” He interrupted, “Sure, most of the other people in the class need to work more than they do.  But you have a different problem: you want to be the ‘good student’, so you work things too hard.  You are going to kill any spontaneity.  Ease off.”

Seeing this pattern from both sides taught me to watch for it in a couple of different ways.

On the receiving end of coaching/reading/instruction, I ask “Is this particular message applicable to me?” It’s hard to know, and if you aren’t careful, you might just dismiss all guidance and end up wearing a tinfoil hat! So try to find what applies before dismissing it. One approach is to take the perspective of peers who also received the message. Is it more or less applicable to them? Where do you fit in the population hearing this message? And you could of course just ask, though I recommend doing that privately.

On the giving end, whenever speaking to a group, it is critical to recognize that what you say might be the right direction for most of the group, but inapplicable–or flat-out counterproductive–for others. Each person is in a different place, and their own experience and worldview colors what you say in as many different ways as there are people listening.

There’s no easy answer, and you can’t just switch to only communicating one-on-one. The important thing is to stay aware of the pattern and consider it for a beat when your spidey sense tells you you’re in it.

Product Development, Pyramids, and Surfing

Successful product development isn’t building a pyramid; it’s surfing a wave. 

The way people talk about products sometimes suggests to me they imagine them more as pyramids: these awe-inspiring structures you build that then draw people from far away.  As if the product itself is the motive force.

I think a much better metaphor is catching a wave on a surfboard.  You are not creating the wave.  You are using your technique, skill, and strength to put yourself in the right place at the right time with the right stance in order to catch the wave.  And then you ride it, constantly adjusting to the shape of the wave, other surfers, etc.

In a way, this is just extrapolation of Steve Blank’s famous advice: “There are no facts inside your building, so get outside.”  The biggest shift in my mind, which struck me while reading Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup”, is that you don’t do that experimentation/research to tell you what the pyramid should look like and where to build it to make people come to you.  You do it to give yourself the best chance of catching a wave that is already out there waiting for someone to ride it (even if “out there” means internal teams using your infrastructural products).

Sure, at some point the product is massive enough to affect the market, just like a surfboard the size of an oil tanker would affect waves by the shore.  But they didn’t start as supertankers. It’s important to get away from the thinking that the product itself is this magic thing that creates the user behavior.

The 1st generation iPhone released today would have missed the wave, underperforming everything else in class.  Released too early, in addition to having a lack of infrastructure (like networks to support data), the market may not have been ready for the idea of a smart phone.  Apple had to catch the wave at the right time.  A famous missed wave is their Newton.

Once they caught the wave, they couldn’t just stand there; they had to keep riding that wave, managing the release of features, cultivating the App Store ecosystem, and protecting their brand while other surfers crowded onto the same wave. Listen to Gustav Soderström tell the story of Spotify, and you get to see this constant adjustment of the surfer in action.

For those giants as well as the rest of us–who aren’t focused on products destined for supertanker-sized, market-altering futures–, it’s important to remember that we are not trying to dream up the perfect thing that will make the world come to us. We are engaged in trying to catch and ride the waves that already exist out there in the world (even if “out there” means internal teams using our infrastructural products).

Market analysis, user research, segmentation, etc. help us pick the wave to catch.  Powerful agile teams are the muscles we use to paddle the board into the right place, going the right speed, at just the right moment.  User testing and metrics are our surfer’s inner ear, helping us adjust our balance to the real signals from the wave.  

As you think about your products, where are you falling into the trap of trying to dream up a pyramid, as opposed to trusting your inner surfer who knows it’s all about catching that wave?

“We already know what we have to do.”

This phrase is a major red flag for me. It comes up in planning discussions, usually to protest of the act of expressing goals: e.g., writing user stories, expressing a sprint goal, coming up with OKRs, etc. I don’t mind protests about the length of planning (it often bloats), the boredom (it can drag), or false certainty (a common trap). But this phrase expresses something different: it shuns alignment.

At this moment, if you ask the team to all write down what they think they have to do, I bet you’d get many different answers. The speaker (not “we”) knows what they want (not “have”) to do. I don’t think the speaker is trying to steamroll the others; I think they do not know/believe in the value of alignment, and this is just the way it comes out.

If a team doesn’t have a shared sense of what they are trying to accomplish, they will waste an enormous amount of effort. If they and their partners (other teams/ppl in the org) don’t have that shared sense, the waste will spread beyond the team.

When this phrase comes up, help the team/person learn the value of alignment:

1. Invite them to humor you in discussing out loud what they feel they need to do. Don’t worry about the form (story, goal, OKR, etc.) at first. Just get the shared understanding.
2. Then, ask openly (i.e., not “I told you so”) whether the group feels more or less clear on their intentions than they did before the conversation.
3. Finally, help them convert it to the desired form, stressing that the point isn’t putting it into the form. The point is externalizing the work to check/ensure that critical shared understanding of intent.

How Do You See This Playing Out Long-Term?

In the last day, I’ve had conversations in completely different contexts (personal and professional), both relating to a decision to be made. In both cases, consideration of the decision seemed focused on the short-term implications: feelings in the heat of the moment, satisfying the most urgent needs, the logistics of acting on the decision, etc. Those short-term implications seemed to be influencing the decision, to the detriment of considering the long-term implications.

It’s no surprise that the thing that’s gonna hit you first is the first thing you think of, but it’s useful to take a beat and ask yourself, “Hang on. Beyond the immediate implications, how does this play out long-term? Where do I see this going? Where would I *like* it to go?” It may do nothing more than reinforce your decision, but it’s cheap and easy to take that beat to check.

How many tabs do you have open right now?

I just finished reading Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential”. In one section, he exhorts cooks to keep a clean station, finishing with the phrase “messy station equals messy mind”. Some people can keep focusing when they have dozens of reminders of them of the other things they need to get done. Or maybe they are just kidding themselves. But regardless, I can’t. Sure, I can struggle through the mess, but if I take the time to clean my station before I work, I am able to dive in with clarity and—most importantly—maintain that focus as I work. Tech debt, almost finished stories, stretch goals/OKRs that you never really believed you could achieve in the first place, emails you read but put off responding to, tools not put away in the workshop, laundry on the floor instead of the hamper, empty toilet paper tube sitting on the bathroom window sill instead of recycling bin, dirty dishes in the sink, clean dishes not emptied from the dishwasher, and so many open browser tabs you can’t even see what they are without hunting through them a click at a time. Every one is a sign that says to your signal-hungry brain, “Hey, you! Deal with me!” No wonder your brain is fried at the end of the day. You’ll never have a completely pristine environment, but cutting down this clutter helps you pour your full attention on the one thing that you actually intend to be doing right now.

Start with your tabs:

1. Use the Pin Tab feature to preserve the apps you use all day: mail, calendar, cloud drive, maybe a task management app if you use one.
2. For all tabs that represent tasks, copy the URL into whatever you use to track your tasks. Include a note of what you need to do with the URL.
3. For all tabs that are “things you want to read/watch someday”, put the URL into a list called “Read/Watch Someday”. My bet is you will never read them, but this way they at least aren’t in your field of view.
4. Once the pinned tabs are the only ones open, decide the ONE thing you will finish next. If it involves opening tabs, close them when you are done. If you are forced to switch to something else that takes more than five minutes before you finish the first task, close the first task’s tabs by putting the URL in your task list.

Work with a clean mind.

Sometimes Silos are Good

A trap I often see–typically as groups of teams are growing–is trying to hold on to that small group feeling for too long. It’s hard to let go! But at some point, you are just forcing it. Sure, you care about the other team, and you are genuinely curious about what’s going on, but eventually it becomes a show on the History Channel: interesting, yes, but not critical to your work.

Weekly status update meetings where you are so ignorant of each other’s contexts that your eyes glaze over? Try an async newsletter.

Multi-team demos where the teams aren’t even in the same space any more? replace it with a quarterly science-fair style demo event where you can still catch up, but not at such high frequency/cost.

The trick is to find the right balance, so that your very valuable live collaboration time is reserved for those you most crucially need to work with.