“Nobody could have known”: inclusive behaviors to counter short-termism
If you say: “Nobody could have known.”
I hear: “We shut out the people who tried to warn us.”
Yes, I do realize that we live in a world of probabilistic events. Lots of things happen that nobody could know in advance. A particular power outage from a hurricane making landfall in an unexpected way may well have been a low-probability event. What was certain was that infrastructure was creaky and that extreme, unpredictable weather events are increasing. To me, “Nobody could have known” usually signifies a lack of attention on known issues and a refusal to integrate warnings from naysayers. Less honest than of “we played the probabilities and lost,” I think “nobody could have known” tries to assert the strategic validity of wishful thinking. I hate it.
No leader should get a free pass because an event that caught them off-guard was low-probability. Over long timeframes, many low probability events become high probability, so this is just another angle on the grand strategic balance of investments (bets) over different horizons.
Long-term investments that make a system more resilient, or “infrastructure,” is a famously unglamorous category (see, for example What’s not sexy but saves lives, resources and the Earth? or the Freakonomics episode In Praise of Maintenance). Tech culture is especially famed for taking infrastructure for granted even while exploiting it lavishly for high-profit, superficial innovation. Who, after all, still thinks about the underlying technology of the Internet?
Software product managers, whose job is to facilitate good decision-making, have a unique role in the innovation vs infrastructure or short- vs long-horizon balance: they have significant power to direct organizational attention, to highlight hotspots and tradeoffs. They can pick their zoom levels and channel energy into different pace layers, the different levels of structure to manage change and absorb shock over different timescales.
Given all the possibilities for where to spend time, and given a bias towards short-term reactivity in our organizations’ cultures, product people face a constant choice: will we be the corporate enforcers of short-termism? Or will we work against the culture towards balance? And if we are trying to create balance, what are the high-leverage ways to push back against a constant flurry of urgent attention-grabbers?
Somebody knows
In every one of my 15 years in product, I would have told you that I was striking a good balance between long- and short-term. And in 14 of those 15 years, I’d have said that the previous year I spent too much attention on the short-term. This could just be a trick of memory — long-term and regret persist where joy and the ephemeral pass — but I don’t think it’s entirely that. I’ve had enough experiences where years of my work was razed to the ground that I can assume I didn’t, and still don’t, scan and manage the landscape of low-probability risks and long-term sustainability well enough.
The most valuable things I’ve learned, I’ve learned through reflection on my failures and appreciation of my colleagues’ successes. Some things I’ve learned observing product managers who best navigate uncertainty are that the ones who make the most steady progress over the long term do this by developing sustainable teams. The product managers who steer good courses, who get blindsided less, are really good at using the wisdom at their disposal. They hear, integrate, and respond to what people are trying to tell them. They act with equanimity and gratitude towards bearers of bad news. They try to increase the field of view for themselves, their teams, and their leadership. They head off “nobody could have known” with a posture of “somebody knows, and I’d like to bring it into the light.”
Good product managers don’t just use the information they surface to make better plans, they use the act of gathering information and responding to it to build trust relationships, in a virtuous cycle that leads both to more openness and better whole-team alignment. They’re really good at promoting psychological safety, or “the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” (Amy Edmondson)
Product people, and leaders in general, have a lot of ways they can make team environments less conducive to psychological safety, and therefore by definition less likely to surface uncomfortable truths:
- Add pressure on teams to deliver
- Challenge team unreasonably, for example on complexity or estimates
- Ask the same question until they get answers they want to hear
- Hoard information or communicate partial, favorable-to-them information
- Diminish non-product (e.g. design, engineering, or support) perspective
- Put pressure on team to cross boundaries, like working outside hours
All these environmental factors matter, but there’s an even more direct lever on pyschological safety. The #1 way I’ve seen product managers foster fear of punishment for speaking up is… (wait for it) by punishing people when they speak up.
This is sometimes overt. I’ve seen product people reduce colleagues to tears in meetings. I’ve seen them skewer others’ arguments mercilessly, often reserving the harshest takedowns for colleagues who dare to front a weak argument. “Punishment” can also be subtle. It can be in meeting behaviors like changing the subject whenever a particular person speaks, immediately forgetting certain information, leaving out of discussions, or withholding credit. In other words, all the things that make speaking up feel not worth the discomfort of conflict.
Luckily, the answer is equally simple (not easy, but simple): The best way to persuade someone they won’t be punished or humiliated next time they speak up is… (you guessed it) not to punish or humiliate this time. More specifically, by aiming to reward people for voicing outsider thoughts, a product person can be intentional about fostering healthy conflict culture.
3 tips to foster psychological safety
Tip 1 Take it seriously and be grateful when someone says something they find uncomfortable to you.
Concretely, train yourself to say “thank you” when someone raises a concern to you. If what they say also makes you uncomfortable, it’s important to notice and control your reaction. Some people are really good at detachment in an environment of conflict. They habitually take a posture of gratitude, rather than defensiveness, for things that challenge their beliefs. It’s a delight to work with people like this, but don’t make the mistake of assuming it came naturally to them. For the vast majority, responding well in that moment takes significant effort self-control (and not infrequently, a history of therapy), but it is critical.
You can reflect later on the myriad of emotions that make you want to shut someone down, but in that moment you need to breathe, find your curiosity, practice your clean language skills, listen, and honor their effort. Assume you are going to act on the information you are receiving… what might you do? What additional information will help you work out if and how to take a next step?
Tip 2 Take the small things as seriously as the big things (almost).
One of my colleagues Nikki Lee once noted how common it is to test the waters with not-too-uncomfortable things, see the response, then decide whether to deeper. Since she said it, I feel like I’ve seen that everywhere: if people don’t get a satisfactory response advocating for the small things, they rarely go bigger.
In other words, try to make use of those respond-with-curiosity muscles for small things, don’t hold them back for big shocks. If you’re not a good steward of small concerns, you’re never going to hear the big ones — or at least not until they bubble over into crises.
I’ll encourage you to be especially careful in how you think of “troublemakers” — you know, the people who seem always to be challenging what you say? Very often these folks feel like someone has to voice the concerns they are raising and that they are taking on that role at a personal cost. The naysayer in this position is showing courage pushing into a psychologically dangerous space. Even if you need to redirect the energy, it is still worth respecting the toll that conflict takes on them.
Tip 3 Make spaces that are as comfortable as possible for voicing meaningful dissent.
Software teams are using interesting approaches like premortems and Black Mirror exercises to scan for bad outcomes and teams’ latent anxiety. Like retrospectives, though, they can only go as deep as the structure, facilitation, and local culture allow.
There is no single blueprint for lowering discomfort levels on the uncomfortable. Depending on the people and the topic, social settings may be good or bad. Deep solo thinking may be useful or counterproductive. The only blanket recommendation I think is valid here is to develop a wide range of feedback and facilitation techniques and make yourself uncomfortable in service of helping others feel comfortable to speak.
The other barrier, in addition to comfort level, may also be the filters people have internalized about what is and isn’t discussed in the org. You may have some success taking people out of standard contexts and using novel formats. I personally feel I’ve had more meaningful spicy conversations where people have not yet internalized barriers, either because they are newer to a problem space or have actively rejected the organizational pressures, than by trying to address internal walls head-on. Your mileage may vary, but culture is a strong force.
Every one of these tips depends on on a foundational practice of noticing. Who talks to you least? Who shows signs of discomfort? What’s your power relationship to them? Where are the in/out lines drawn for inclusion in conversations? Who’s right on the other side? Who is least validated in meetings? Who said uncomfortable things? How were they treated?
Please bear in mind that even if you are pretty good at fostering psychological safety in your interactions, you have strong structural currents which are running against you right now. Remote work has been shown to increase mistrust and suspicion. Anyone mid-career or beyond may also have been scarred by people in positions like yours or who look like you.
Tiny behaviors and long-term strategy
In my experience, companies say they want long-term thinking, but then consistently reward the short-term, flashy heroics. Let’s be honest: you’re probably not going to gain money or status by prioritizing sustainability. Judging by the number of blog posts out there advocating you spend “at least a day a month on the strategic,” a lot of people do recognize the need to shift the balance towards longer-term considerations. And if you’re like me, you may be perfectly comfortable sacrificing personal advancement for lasting positive impact. So what are useful practices to “prioritize the long-term”?
A week-long strategy retreat is unlikely to materially improve a company’s response to slow-ROI or infrastructural challenges. Moreover, despite the glamor of the word “strategy,” companies commonly squeeze out the foundational practices that make organizations effective over the horizons strategy is meant to encompass. Things like long-term reflection and knowledge retention, sustainable working, inclusive culture, and trust take time and determination to grow and are relatively easy to destroy.
If you’re looking to address your infrastructural weaknesses, a high-leverage practice is to hear and incorporate the views of people marginalized in your org. The people maintaining existing capabilities are very often low-status and underfunded. I don’t think this is universal, but in our culture at least, long-term success, infrastructure, and inclusivity are deeply entangled.
When you work on long-term sustainability for your org, I’d like to invite you to spend your precious energy on the inner work of inclusivity rather than strategy summits or insightful slide decks. Sit with your biases. Notice where you’ve been getting defensive or shutting people down. Analyze your uncomfortable conversations. Inspect your reactions. Possibly even map who you are hearing from and who you are not. A major unsung part of prioritizing the long-term is about making space to hear, integrate, and act on alternative perspectives. And if you’ve exhausted the ones you have, it’s about finding or developing more.
Prioritizing the long-term is embodied in the tiniest of moments: it’s your choice to seek out discomfort rather than react to organizational fires. It’s your choice of response when someone tells you something you find unpleasant. Inclusion, resilience, and infrastructure: are all entwined, and I hope this gives you ideas about how to exert real, cumulative influence over the long-term.
