After “Disagree and Commit”
As software engineers, managers, and leaders, we often find ourselves solving problems for which there are multiple possible paths forward. We might be debating how to architect our services. We might be deciding between two ways to structure our teams. We might be weighing the pros and cons of building out an entirely new product.
Because of uncertainties about the future, unanimous agreement is often not reached. To move forward, a leader (maybe a senior engineer, maybe a manager, maybe a project lead) sometimes has to make a call before everyone else is convinced. An organization is healthiest when these folks can “disagree and commit,” which means that the team then unifies behind the decision and does their best to reach excellent outcomes together. This phrase is so commonly used (and perhaps so evidently a good approach) that multiple people are credited with its invention.¹
The trick, of course, is that it can be hard to disagree and commit. In some cases, a person is so invested in a path not taken (either due to ego or personal history) that they struggle to commit, and may undermine the outcomes. In other purely random cases, a single individual could be on the “losing” side for multiple decisions in a row and begin to question whether they are valued.
If you have detected that someone on your team is having difficulty disagreeing and committing, I suggest that you proactively set up a group meeting at a set point in the future to look back at the decision and re-assess whether it was the correct one. This can be weeks away for small decisions or months away if there are outcomes that take a while to emerge. Scheduling this proactively serves a few purposes:
- You are expressing that those who disagree may still be correct. The decision doesn’t mean that their perspective was invalid, just that you had to make some bet about the future to move forward.
- You are making sure you pause and learn from outcomes. It’s easy in our business to just move on to the next thing, but creating a pause point proactively help ensure we do better next time.
- You give them a chance to say “I told you so.” Hopefully they take the higher ground in the end and don’t say it out loud, but the idea that they could offers some nice mental release.
How to approach the conversation
There are (at least) two ways to hold the reflection conversation. First, you can schedule a short meeting with one topic: reflecting on this specific decision. Assuming that you are the facilitator, tips for this kind of conversation are:
- Invite everyone who was involved in the original decision.
- Create a shared document that all attendees have write access to. Put details of the original decision made at the top. Create section headers for “Outcomes” and “Lessons Learned.”
- Give attendees the option of entering bullets in the two blank sections in advance of the meeting.
- Start the meeting with a few minutes of individual time, where everyone opens the document themselves and continues to add their perspectives while reading what everyone else has written. The duration of this time will be dependent on how complex the outcomes were (and how much folks are writing).
- Use the rest of the meeting to discuss the items in the document, validating outcomes where necessary, but spending most of your time aligning on lessons learned. These may turn into action items, but will probably just yield a shared understanding.
- This is not a forum for calling out individual actions or performance. Focus on the outcomes and lessons learned so that the entire team can mature.
The second option is to set the conversation up as a part of a standing retrospective. Some tips if you go this route:
- At original decision-making time, be very clear which retrospective will house this topic. Write it down publicly, perhaps as a part of the calendar invite.
- If you use a Lean Coffee approach² for your retrospectives (brainstorm discussion topics, vote, sort, discuss in order), then you’ll need to go outside the mechanism a bit and put one discussion topic at the top of the pile. Make sure this discussion comes first to honor prior commitments.
- The structure of “outcomes” and “lessons learned” may still be useful, but don’t get hung up on that. Having the space to discuss is the most important thing, so you can just use the format from the rest of your retrospective.
Regardless of which method you choose, it is critical to follow through on the initial promise and actually hold the conversation. There are few leadership mistakes that undermine your reputation more than setting expectations and then silently ignoring them down the road.
[1] Wikipedia. Disagree and Commit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disagree_and_commit
[2] Agile Coffee. What is Lean Coffee? https://agilecoffee.com/leancoffee/