Tug of war in online decision making
Have you found that you don’t tackle the key disagreements during workshops? Do they end up in the “parking lot” but never get talked about again? You aren’t focusing on discourse or allowing it to happen enough. It isn’t all your fault though, most of the tools aren’t set up to allow disagreement by default.
I most recently found this to be important when facilitating a set of prioritization workshops for a team. They had discussed many different ways to break up their portfolio but when we needed to choose one the ability to do so in the tool we were using, Miro, was difficult. Not just because we had many items to prioritize, across many leads but also because finding those hot spots took extra care than just allowing for open ended conversation.
In this article, I want to talk about the times I’ve found disagreement to be especially helpful in workshops and decision making. Then I’ll give you some techniques for bringing that out with the tools we currently have like whiteboards, sticky notes, Miro, and others. And finally, I’ll talk about how these tools could be made better to discuss the disagreements between teams.
Disagreement is decision making
In a recent talk I gave at the Product Operations Summit about “Deciding How to Decide” (talk available to PLA members) we focused on the way that groups of people make decisions. The most important aspect is the discourse before we make the decision.
The discourse is why we can be bad at individual decision making due to different cognitive biases but much better when in a group. A recent post by Tom Stafford talking in more depth about the benefits of discourse in decision making and avoiding cognitive biases.
What is key about this discourse is that we need to get all of the disagreements out in the open, not only to create alignment but because it makes our ideas better. I’ve talked a lot about this in adversarial product management, a discussion of different techniques to have disagreement help in our work.
Enabling disagreement in workshops
There are many workshops that I’ve facilitated that disagreement was at the core:
- Prioritization in the Eisenhower matrix — people have different opinions on where a particular item will fit in the 2x2.
- Wardley mapping — disagreements about what stage of evolution a particular item is currently in.
- Assumption mapping — people don’t always agree on how important something is or how much evidence we have (especially if you invite researchers).
The best way I’ve found to encourage disagreement in workshops is to have a starting point for a positioning, even if it is set by a facilitator, and then allow the group to move them around. From there you can have people dot vote for the ones they are most in disagreement with. This creates a list of hotspots to discuss.
In the example I gave above, we did this to identify where people disagreed with the placement of an item in the Eisenhower matrix. This was sensitive to people because it could result in different resources applied to that work.
I’ve added to this method a lean coffee-like discussion where we time box to 5 minutes per topic. Of course, we allow for more discussion if needed but usually the majority wanted to move on after the initial points were made. It seems that by keeping things moving we start to see more patterns as a group rather than getting stuck on one in particular.
Finally, I ask for the teams to reflect and think about what strategy, “even over” statements, or trade-off was being made during all of the different topics. This helps build alignment in a set of principles that people may have been working through intuitively but couldn’t write down.
Enabling disagreement in documents
Not all discussions take place in person though. A lot of this discourse happens in asynchronous documents like Google Docs.
Many times these documents get filled up with comments that are either ignored or simply closed. I’ve found that setting the ground rules for comments ahead of time and when we will plan on moving forward helps set better expectations.
I’ve also found that depending on the state of the document (e.g. how “done” it is) we may want different feedback. Earlier we are looking for high abstraction, conceptual feedback. Getting lots of copy editing or concern about how polished the doc is not helpful.
The opposite is true when we are near the final decision taking place. We will want to remove extra comments and codify the final information being considered in a way that is easily understood by most people that would happen on to the document.
If someone isn’t part of the smaller decision group then they should expect to provide feedback that is considered but it may not sway the final decision.
Allowing a tug-of-war in collaboration products
One interface I’ve seen that really allows a great tug-of-war between experts is the Unanimous.ai crowd-intelligence platform. It asks questions of people and they need to pull, with a magnet, the answer to their position or the next best one. You can see it in action here:
What we need to allow more of is interactions that show a tension that is created between two people’s placement of a particular card. And how we can then find some appropriate middle ground for that positioning or at least have a good discussion. This should be supported like dot voting in Miro, MURAL, FigJam, etc.
This could also mean specific ways to enable better discourse in asynchronous discussions like Google Docs. I’ve seen many times that comments just sit there without any discussion or are simply closed without any discussion. We should create a way for documents to branch and merge discussions about particular points. And then close all of them when we are moving forward with a discussion.
Call to action: build more ways to disagree
The final call to action I’ll give to everyone is twofold: please create more ways to disagree inside your meetings and if you work on a work platform build it in. Without disagreement we can’t have good discourse of decision making without disagreement. You don’t build the right culture of interaction without allowing for the natural disagreement that will happen.
Give people more opportunities to play a safe game of tug-of-war.
