AA249 - Disagree & Commit: Corporate Gaslighting? (And What To Do About It)

Is Amazon's famous leadership principle being weaponized against you? 

Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel as we talk about how "disagree and commit" becomes "shut up and obey" in most companies. 

Watch or listen as we discuss one of tech's most misunderstood management concepts, covering topics such as:

• Difference between Amazon and Your Company
• Red flag phrases
• Why psychological safety is non-negotiable
• What happens when smart people stop pushing back
• The OnE lEaDeRsHiP tRiCk managers hate

Additionally, drawing on research and experience, we build a framework for protecting yourself and your team from toxic decision-makers attempting to lift-and-shift the walls and roof of "disagree and commit" without the foundation. That's right - practical, diagnostic questions and actionable strategies to distinguish legitimate debate from leadership cowardice!

#ProductManagement #AgileLeadership #WorkplaceCulture

Google's Project Aristotle (2012-2014), Organizational Cynicism by James Dean Jr., Pamela Brandes, and Robbie Darwadkar (1998), Understanding and Managing Cynicism about Organizational Change by Rikers, Wanous, and Austin (1997), Arguing Agile Episode 243: How Corporate Turns Good People Bad, Jeff Bezos 2016 Letter to Shareholders

LINKS
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Transcript

0:00

know, um, every bad manager that i've ever had, that read amazon's disagree and commit they use it as a fancy way a fancy way to say just shut up and do what i told you ooh shut up before I told you ok, but Brian what's the alternative? at some point, everybody has to row in the same direction someone has to make the call yeah, I get, like, I get it, but that's what guided me, like that thing about like, hey management wants us to do a thing and just doesn't care about our input, but also we need to be successful at the same time like that, that, what's it called one of the reasons that I pivoted my career like purposefully into product management is we can't assume that the person making the call actually listened to the disagreement or any of the evidence presented and didn't just like lead with their ego like we, we can't assume that because the whole business and everyone's jobs are relying on that so from my perspective disagree and commit has just become corporate gaslighting it's, it's hey, we value your input follow it immediately by now forget everything that, uh, we just said and just do what I say oh boy, yeah, so you're saying Amazon built a trillion dollar company based on gaslighting? I'm saying Amazon is not your company or my company and your manager is not Jeffrey Bezos didn't, question, hey I know we disagreed on this thing but the latest evidence is in the latest data is in and, I was we revisit the decision because if you can't ask that question and have a serious conversation with serious people, you're what I'm saying is you're basically dealing with unserious people using a principle of a successful company as a weapon, is, I'll ask the welcome back to Arguing Agile uh, this is your first time, welcome, I'm your host product manager and human Pareto principal, Brian Orlando, and-host enterprise business agility consultant and the czar of the time and this is my co box, Mr. Om Patel if this is your first time, like and subscribe because, uh, about 80 % of the people that watch this on YouTube they don't subscribe, and that means that, we have to go back to the salt mines yeah, and they don't sleep well at night, so if you want to sleep well at night, please, like and subscribe so, this episode is about Amazon's disagreeing commit, and how your company is not Amazon maybe, and maybe by the end of the episode maybe it will be that Amazon is not Amazon I'm not quite sure, but by the end of this episode, spot when disagree and commit is being used as a decision making apparatus with strong evidence based weighting and proper debate versus what we normally see versus it just being weaponized to make you shut up and move along hopefully by the end of this episode, you'll also know exactly what questions to ask before you agree to you'll be able to commit to anything and, we'll arm you with the framework to protect yourself and hopefully, your team, from becoming yes men in a culture that punishes honesty and most importantly today, we're gonna try to teach you the one non -negotiable requirement that separates legitimate disagree and commit from leadership cowardice, that's right, ohm, we're teaching the one trick that all managers hate we're gonna actually cover more than one, but if you go away with one, that's great, and you can challenge leadership cowardice, which by the way is a thing that's one more than most people have exactly, and it's worth every penny you didn't pay for, oh, oh no there's no money involved in this transaction I'm out let's start with a workplace reality most people quoting disagree and commit they've never actually read what amazon says about it and what amazon says might surprise you because it puts way more burden on the leader than on the person disagreeing yeah, so this, this is interesting because most people coming into this would expect the opposite and yet amazon surprisingly like you said the emphasis is on the leader to shoulder the burden right so we'll see how this works out so so amazon has its principles corporate principles on their website, and helpfully, Andy Jassy is on there, reciting the principles and only the way that Andy Jassy can do we paid him more, so he could be here tonight, in spirit why don't we watch that, and it'll give us a good grounding, and it'll give everyone watching this a good grounding, it'll be more research than your boss did, so, let's let's start with that, so we can all understand what it's supposed to mean from the lips of babes listen, you're already winning folks, so hang in ahead, so most of it is on the screen, I'm gonna go ahead and mute our lines, ohm, and then we'll let Andy Jassy take over, alright, here we go so this is what, this is, by the way, this is on Amazon's website, well actually, it's on their official YouTube channel, so the official YouTube channel inside Amazon, why has it only got 102k subscribers, that's so weird anyway have backbone disagree and commit leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting leaders have conviction and are tenacious they do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion once a decision is determined they commit wholly at amazon you are not just empowered to speak up if you think we're doing something wrong for customers of the business you're expected to do so regardless of level i can tell you that i get a lot of emails all the time from everybody at the company at every level about ideas they have and i value them and i appreciate them i told you so is an expression that's completely useless at amazon because it's a failure one way or the other it's either i didn't speak up when i was supposed to speak up and have backbone or that i'm not fully committing to the decision that we made and disagreeing and committing we have this concept that we've talked about a long time at the company about social cohesion and social cohesion is this notion that people often will compromise with one another to get along and so the canonical example is you know you look at a ceiling and one person says it's 10 feet and the other person says no it's 14 feet and they say let's compromise it's 12 feet well it's usually not 12 feet you know there's usually some answer that's closer to the truth now most issues that we deal with every day are not as simple as what i just said they're much more complicated much more nuanced but the point remains the idea for us is to be truth -seeking we're not trying to compromise with one another to make each other feel better or to get along we are trying to get to truth for what matters to customers that's what we got to make decisions based on and then after whatever debate we have on issues and some issues are so difficult that we debate it for across many meetings and many weeks but once we make that decision we have to as a group disagree and commit and wholly commit to that decision even if you are on the other side of what got decided to be pursued now this again seems fairly obvious but it's sometimes difficult because we hire smart people and we hire people who have a lot of mission passion and it's hard to let go of what you think matters most for customers but at a certain point businesses have to make decisions otherwise they can't move they will be stagnant and once we make a decision we have to all get on board because the the areas that we're pursuing as businesses they have such large expanses with so many things to solve for customers with so many capable competitors that we need to focus all our energy rowing the same way so have backbone disagree and commit is a very important leadership principle to be great at I'm gonna leave Andy Jesse here in case we need to refer to him later ok alright, there was the Andy Jassy video that we just listened to, or watched, and then there's also the, everyone can go and look at the Jeff Bezos 2016 letter to shareholders Amazon Leadership Principle number 13, have backbone, disagree, and commit I think it's number 4 on their website here, so I don't know what the difference is with the numbers or whatever, it doesn't really matter to me because I'm just specifically talking about it in this podcast yeah, have backbone, disagree, and commit that's the full, name of the principle, so this podcast is about you know, your company decides they want to adopt this Amazon principle in house and say, ah, we, Amazon does disagree and commit, that means we gotta disagree and commit too, I don't know why your company is full of people from the 1920s with the transatlantic act, we, we have to disagree and commit also, um, that's so weird, yeah, yeah, so a couple of things here if your company is looking to do any of this whether it's, you know, for or against this idea of disagree and commit just remember, your company is not Amazon that's right I think that really is the crux of it because if your company doesn't have the right kind of leadership that will either encourage and, you know, summon these people to the fore and say feel free to disagree right you're not gonna go very far in your company disagreeing, right, if that what they value is just yes men or yes people I'm glad you're going down this road, like I definitely think there'll be a part of this podcast where we really hook on to the idea that, you can't just lift a principle or a practice or a Spotify model or whatever it is from another company and just drag and drop it into your company and expect that you will have the same success we, we got squads and tribes now, ohm, therefore we will also corner the streaming online music industry that's not gonna, do you have two billion dollars in funding? are you based in the EU? so this parallel with the last podcast that we did, with the Spotify model is valid, but I think I would say this, about that, right in this case, Amazon actually implemented this disagree and commit ethos, at least for a while I don't know if it's still being followed I know it was at some point so unlike the Spotify motto example Spotify didn't even implement their own motto, whereas amazon did implement their own model and i might say to at least some modicum of success for them right it's hard to measure but so that just bear in mind that you know that's the that's the biggest difference across the two so let's let's actually get into the the the things that you're going to hear that let you know that your company is cosplaying disagree and commit here so that yeah the against the things that you'll you thinking about our podcast and say, oh, no, there's some red flags here, hey some phrases uh, we've discussed this enough it's time for you to commit ohm, we've spent enough time talking about this, now ohm, you need to commit. Yeah, I absolutely think everybody has probably come across that at their workplace, right, and the other one to kind of move us forward is to say you're a, you're not a team player we need you to be a team player the decision's been made, ohm, you're not being a team player yes, yes, absolutely, let's just move forward right? that's right, we already mentioned if you hear these things number one, like the, the, the Jeffrey Bezos framework, when when you watch any videos with Jeffrey Bezos that's right, I have to say his full name every time I say it, because I can't get the song out of my head you're welcome, Curtis that, says, hey, like think of it as a gamble will you gamble with me, implying that we are sharing the risk from making the decision together that is the way he frames it and the other thing that I'll throw out as evidence is the Amazon principle is not just disagree and commit, hey, throw your disagreements out, throw them into the water and then we just take the boat off to a different location and do something else the Amazon's principle starts with have backbone disagree and commit, that assumes that, like, hey, it might be uncomfortable to be disagreeing with a group of people I've said this in previous podcast before, it's very difficult to go to a group of people and tell them that they're wrong when nobody believes they're wrong and you're the only one right, but if you have evidence, right it's still difficult, it's still difficult listen, it is difficult, right, no doubt but if you have evidence, it helps you heaps and bounds, you know, and then you might be on your own here, but you can be evidence led, so disagree but in the end, be prepared to say, ok, well look, you know, 9 out of 10 people here do not see what I'm trying to say what are you gonna do? disagree and commit that, that's the part and, you know, this isn't all about later on coming back and say, hey, look, I told you so I know we're going to come back to this idea later in the podcast as but it's not about that, it's not about how, hey, I told you it's really around, are you listening to me, right, and I'm listening to you, but here's what I'm bringing to the table give it it's due air time and say, agree or disagree with me, but let's have a discussion at least if you don't say anything, even though you believe it to be, the case you're not disagreeing you're simply committing and capitulating, and that is not the right way to go I agree with that, but also, the nails on the chalkboard part of Andy Jassy's, other than his heinous jacket, the heinous part of that for me is say, oh, well, you didn't push back hard enough that's the heinous part for me well, that, that's usually, yeah, that's usually the, the weapon that they use when you turn out to be correct in your intuition, right and you say, well, look, what I was telling you actually, you know, turned out to be the case, right at that point, you expect them to say, yeah, thank you for bringing that up way back when, and we were wrong no, that, that does not happen, ok what happened instead is you should have shouted loud enough. That's right. That's what happens. That's right. At the end of the day, it's your fault. this again, maybe early in the podcast, this grinds my gourd when they say, hey, you didn't shout loud enough. I shouted plenty loud. That's right. You didn't hear and you chose not to hear me. There's a difference, right? my message was loud and clear. You didn't hear me but now you're saying I should have shouted loud enough how loud, for God's sake I mean, it's just, it, again when we come to that point, it's just moving goalposts, that's what it comes down to, the commit part of it assumes, assumes, again in the Amazon culture, it assumes that a genuine debate actually happened with evidence taken in good faith and examined in good faith, right if you skip the debate part you skip the legitimacy of this whole principle and you might as well not do it, I mean, I understand it sounds great, you're wrapping a nice corporate blanket around a real nasty, like, oh, it's ego well, nobody, like, nobody wants to hear that, nobody wants to feel that their ego is dominating so they wrap that nice wet blanket around, let's disagree and commit see, Amazon does it, so we can do it too category I have three, actually in this is, did the person who made the decision ask any clarifying questions, or did the takeaway in this they just simply shut you down? so that's one yeah, and then, if you, another one to know if they are really interested, or if they're just shutting you down is if they change one of the takeaways anything about the original plan going into the discussion and then the one that I would demand that's right, I said demand the one that I would demand is, what is our mechanism for revisiting this discussion slash decision when the evidence changes in the future ooh, I'm willing to wager that most companies don't even have that mechanism in place once a decision is made, that's it, it's a done deal everybody just goes blindly forward and, and, you know, keep rolling toward that freaking, iceberg right? yeah, I mean, if we're gonna use titanic metaphors uh, this is the, the rest of this podcast will be presented in 1914 evidence but, most companies don't even have a mechanism for gathering the metrics they don't let alone coming back to a decision if I could go back early in the podcast I would say one of the things you're gonna hear if you even propose something like that is brian we can't we can't revisit every single minor decision we'll be stuck in meetings all day that that'll be what they'll say yeah yeah yeah there are a million reasons i'll come up with but unfortunately the cost of getting it wrong here far exceeds the cost of a meeting or two or ten seriously oh boy all right so let's see what do you think about this category has your manager ever actually changed a decision based on your pushback or your team's pushback or does disagree and commit always flow in one direction I was gonna say downhill let's yikes, circling, circling, you know in the southern hemisphere circling the drain, the wrong way around doesn't matter, I don't even know if it's true let us know if it's true in the comments and if you found this useful stick around for our next debate which is on why this principle fails without psychological safety everyone's favorite four letter word psychological safety, so we've established that the principle of disagree and commit what it's supposed to mean but we both know it only works if people feel safe to disagree in the first place spoiler alert, I would guess that most companies, they don't feel free to disagree with their boss's boss or whoever's saying this is our new bold direction and strategy with that being said, here's a part that totally proves disagreeing commit is way sketchier than a chevy vega, people will actually disagree, but for most companies, speaking up is move, so what you get isn't disagree and commit, it's shut up and comply is a career limiting there's other, there's other things it assumes that I could have said right there, like, right, yes, but this is a family show, yeah, seeing on your picture you're screen, the 1975 Chevy Vega was actually the motor trend car of the year that year, but it also was uh, precipitated the demise of the of the car manufacturer it's a great car for research purposes because not GE, what's it called? GM GM, GM took a, they started their slide in that year until an eventual bankruptcy right, and that, that was the car, that went downhill I, I also found a bunch of other I'm not, like in the prep for this podcast, not that anyone cares, but in the prep for this podcast the, the Mustang 2 was in here, oh yeah, the the Pinto was in here but if you're gonna stay on Chevy the, the Pinto, by the way, shouldn't have been a car because it was horrible I went back a couple years because the Corvair is the reason that modern cars have seatbelts and, and that was the, that was the Lee Iacocca era and he, and, and like internal memos and stuff like that they knew that they could have spent a little more money in the development phase to fix some of the flaws of the Corvair like the, the back end suspension and stuff like that yeah they just didn't they, they didn't Iacocca was a classic guy who really only cared about, you know, economics and the K-Car principle, right? he would be an interesting one to do a whole episode deep dive on, because he was one of the first CEOs that embodied the rockstar CEO, like our modern CEOs are all like the, like the Jensen Wangs of the world, they show up with their cool leather jacket, you know what I mean the, the, the, what's his face, the, the I'm looking for a man in finance guy, what's his it's his name, Sam Altman oh, sam just looking for a man in pinehounds sam holtman, that's who you are we talking about the category of psychological safety number one, you'll get the people that just immediately discard the category to say oh, psychological safety is just a bunch of nonsense, it's not a real thing yeah, like the old twitter Elon Musk like he, where he didn't understand psychological safety it's like astrology yeah, he thought it was like hear, my door is always open for feedback, if you hear hey I want to hear everyone's dissenting opinions like in a meeting and then everyone stays silent or if you hear, if you hear somebody that is in charge making a decision, say I don't hear anyone pushing back, so that means everyone must agree with it, must agree with it yeah, all of those the crowbar person, yeah all of those statements are in they are an indication to you that you have a low psychological safety in your environment let's, let's talk about what that even means low psychological safety in your environment I mean, we've quoted the fearless organization in the 2018 fearless organization by Amy Edmondson a couple podcasts now, again, we've probably quoted enough where we probably should just do a podcast on that subject um, but also, uh, for have all the research and all the findings that came out of Google's Project Aristotle 2012 to 2014, they did Project Aristotle, and that basically found teams that had psychological safety and were, were encouraged to speak up and felt able to speak up inside their teams, those were the successful teams, and the teams that stayed together, and etc, etc, like I go on and on and on go look into those low empathy leaders who are looking to confirm their biases, not really looking for pushback or looking for the strongest evidence to rise to the top strongest decision with the strongest evidence to rise to the top the open door the open door policy, y 'all ooh, the open door listen, that means nothing if walking through there gets you closer to the revolving door because you're going against, you're dissenting you're now perceived as a dissenter right, as a naysayer, so if the person who you're going in to speak with has already made up their mind you're off to a losing start to begin with you know, I would ask you to think about when was the last time your leader genuinely cared about listening to um, other people's opinions as opposed to saying this is what should happen, right? right? and then everybody just goes yeah, ok and then your everyone just goes response was silence because silence isn't agreement, there's a lot of leaders, quote leaders professional managers, right? there's a lot of, quote, leaders that don't want to hear what I'm about to say silence is not agreement it's your employees practicing self -preservation they're putting the, they're putting the, the, the floaty donut on before jumping over on the Titanic right that, that, that doesn't mean that they're happy to jump out it just means they don't want to drown once they're forced to jump off this sinking ship that's all that means people stop warning you when the warnings get, get punished absolutely absolutely I think, you know real leaders would actually be going beyond that and saying we really respect people's contrarian opinions right, to what they're saying and go out of the way to reward those opinions even though in the end they may not amount to much, at least they're listening and that act goes a long way towards encouraging the team to speak up whoever the team is, right maybe nine times out of ten they have an answer for whatever the rebuttal might be, that's fine but that's a double check on their own thinking, and if a leader is not open to that I'm sorry, they're not a leader so much as a dictator, at that point I have a, I have a great story I've told this on the podcast before, but I think it might have been the pre hundreds, oh ok, so it's been a while, yeah, was in the room for a team's sprint planning I wasn't on the team, I think I was a manager at the time, and one of my people that I was a manager for was in the room like the only, the only woman on the team of all men, type of, type of situation right, and there was a change request, I can't remember exactly what the change request was, it was something along the lines of the, the back end database configuration tool that was like a GUI, right it needed a checkbox to turn off some kind of setting and I remember her pushing back against the checkbox to say, if we enable this checkbox, then it's gonna unlock like 16 test scenarios or something like that, so I don't remember exactly how, I wish I could remember because we had a desktop app and a mobile app on android and ios so basically the checkbox had to be checked on desktop and both mobile environments both ways, right, but enabled and disabled, but there was something about the enabling that led to some other function that was new that would have also caused a multiplier, you check the checkbox and then you have to go perform like 16 integration tests, because of the downstream effects, and and because that team always shortcut, they always shortcut, sprint planning nobody ever properly, went down the path of all the second, third order consequence, sure, of doing things and she steered the team down to saying, hey what do we need to test, and what do I need to do, in this sprint should we actually pull this story in right, and it started off as like oh, it's super easy, we just check, check boxes do the thing, do some quick tests, it's easy just a mobile test, desktop test, it's done she's well mobile test on iOS mobile test on Android, which one, they're oh well both she's well now it's three tests, but what about these other apps that use it down the road well and these other apps, yeah, you're right I guess they would each have to be tested twice and then it compounded and the team slowly, over a whole sprint planning, slowly realized that that one tiny little checkbox that was asked for at a very high level in the organization was gonna compound and turn into a giant effort and I, you know, and, and, and I was there too, so I was we can bring I remember leaving the meeting bringing in another analyst, because it was ending up being becoming a big thing, but it was high priority so I was I'll bring out of the people and we'll, look, we'll throw the whole team out and we'll get it done, you know, we'll, we'll jump on this work late and work hard or whatever it is and we were done, the sprint playing was over last 15 minutes of sprint playing at that company, you bring leadership in the product people, the product people didn't participate by the way, oh, they would all come in at the end, and then get the run down of what the team committed to, and then you know, get, basically get the get the run down, get the, get the cliff notes this is what we committed to, this is what we think we're gonna do, you know what I mean, and that's it that's the end of the thing last 15 minutes they brought the leadership folks in and the product people in this one checkbox thing ballistic, they they leadership went decided that was the hill they were gonna die on, and they just started berating the team over it, it's a checkbox it's yes or no it should take two seconds to implement and test, I don't understand why you guys think it's a big thing, obviously they weren't included in any of the discussions and, the person that worked for me, that individual tried to explain it to the leadership, which is a very bad they obviously, it wasn't a disagree and commit kind of situation, it was, I'm gonna tell you what you're doing in this sprint and I don't want to hear any pushback and that, she was gone two weeks later, I'm just gonna point that out, she was like she was this is not, this is not the way that normal adults talk to each other and that's it, that's it oh boy, you know, the moral of that story is, assess the level of psychological safety you think you have do you have a bunch of people that are standing on top of the mountain saying, hey Sisyphus, catch this rock or, here are ten rocks which ones do you think you can get up the hill by when, and how can we help, and then they get out of the way I mean organizations go the whole gamut from the first to the second that I just described there are some leaders that really do understand they get it but not everybody does and if you get, you know, if you have the wrong type of people who are quote unquote influencers they can undermine your success quite drastically you know what, like, Starkly sticks out with that story for me, I don't even know if I'll leave this in the podcast, what Starkly sticks out with that story for me, is like, uh, I wish in retrospect, I would've just like thrown my badge on the table and be like hey man, I quit, are you here's my gun, here's my badge I would've been here's my gun, here's my badge if you're gonna be like this and not be an adult I'm out, I quit today, wish I would have done that at that point, just because I, in retrospect, I don't think it would have really changed anything, but in retrospect the manager of development was also in the room who was kind of my peer in the organization at that point, and he didn't say anything, he didn't challenge his leadership at all, oh, he was a yes man he new to the company too, so I don't, I mean, he did push back in that instance, he didn't but I think if I would have gone if I would have gone like full nuclear mode, I think, I think he would have stepped in as well to be hey, we already talked about it, it's a bad decision you're, you're out of line here and you need to step down, if I would have went ballistic I think maybe I could have gotten him to go ballistic, and this is not good advice, don't follow my advice don't do this, but the only way in that particular toxic environment to get leadership to back down, is when they would get ganged up on, in public right, so I was gonna say, you said you, you know, you potentially could have been that person I think I could have, yeah it would have worked even better if more than just you strength in numbers so if four or five people just say, listen, this is crazy we're out right, right that will cause them to sit up and take notice because their team just erodes right but it doesn't happen in real life normal people are not throwing their badging gun on the table and be you know what this is like no, they're in the self-preservation mode you've pushed us too far, you've gone too far, you're being a little too unprofessional, we made this, we spent all this time in this, quote, ritual, or whatever the scrum things are called ceremony the only, I mean, it would not have grinded everyone's gears that's right, I said that it would not have grinded everyone's gears as much if we hadn't already discussed all these points, it's just management didn't want to hear the context all they wanted to hear was, you made the wrong decision no matter what the debate was yeah, and we're making the decision for you, and that, that that's, it goes very in line with disagree and commit, it's you're doing this in the sprint, and you can disagree all you want keep rowing, I mean the nice thing about this debate is is that really disagree and commit, or is that oh, that Brian, that's just that one workplace, I would push back to say I don't know, I've been in a lot of software shops where that same discussion, maybe not about a checkbox, happens, and you're on the losing side, regardless oh boy, it's a tech thing more than it is, it is, it really is but, you know, back in the 90s, you know, back when really this whole divide of apps between working in the browser or mobile that came about this was a real thing, people just said we need to monetize, so get it working on the web, that's it, it's like a lot of people are on the road when they need to do this, or mobile, so should we not have a parallel strategy or maybe even flip it on its head and go mobile first yeah right i know that became a thing much later on yeah but in the early days it was not a thing trust me when people said does it work on the on the browser that's great we can do that and there were more browsers back in the day too opera and all these other browsers also the browsers back in the day were like the the browsers today generally are compatible but right back in the day were very, like you had to test on each individual one indeed, and, and, and before these test tools came about, you actually had to get, when you decided to go with mobile, you had to get all the physical devices in order to test on them that's right so you had a bunch of iPads, you know, a bunch of phones, Google phones, you know, Apple phones, whatever back then, it was a thing where leadership would come in and you know, it's it this way, or do you have any reason to believe, what they're really saying is, do you have evidence, right no, within a couple of weeks they were gone, and that is the problem, I, Ryan I hope you're listening, because I, I remember this era, I, I lived through this era because I remember, the developers get caught in one or two of those kind of discussions, and then they end up adding tracking of the device type and the device version, so much duck net they, QA during the area you're describing and the developer's getting hammered to be oh, you're only gonna support N -1 and then them going and saying, well we can't just willy nilly say n minus one for operating system or whatever remember working in right we need to add and collect the devices and put them in the database so we can actually go do metrics and say, hey, most people that use our service, you know 78% of people are on android, so we need to prioritize the android testing versus the iphone testing and then make actual, and that was developers, this is like this is maybe 2010 2012, maybe, something like that before product management was a thing yeah, yeah, that sounds about right and developers were saying, hey we're losing these arguments to people that are not informed, people that are not serious people, that's what I'm saying, you know that are not informed about important things in technology, let's add some metrics, and we're gonna, like, work in the middle of the night, because nobody's giving us time to do this, so we can be better informed, to have better conversations and do better things, like that, let's move to takeaways because we, we beat this one up more than I even could have imagined we beat this one up, and the takeaway in this category listen, to test your team's psychological safety I have a very simple diagnostic for you, couple questions, super easy when was the last time that someone on your team told you that you were wrong in a meeting or public setting, not, not one on one not privately, not in your cube, not at the bar or after work or whatever somebody on your team told you, and you, by you I mean a leader somebody with decision making authority is what I mean, yeah, told you that you were wrong, right, or told the boss that somebody was wrong in a public setting and you were there, when was the last time that happened number one, number two what happened to that person afterwards, I don't mean like the next day, I mean shortly after three months, four months, six months what, what, were they gone what happened to that person, and and, and, can you even remember the last time that anyone challenged anybody in a public setting, or asked a tough question in a, in a, in a company meeting, remember the, remember the podcast where we played, and it was a real beast to edit, Jamie Dimon, we played Jamie Dimon's rant where someone's hey, listen I, I got hired remote and I, I don't, you know is, can I have, be up to my manager when I come to the office because I'm, I'm, you know I don't really, work in an office I don't have a, he, and he just, like exploded with F -bombs he did, yeah, yeah yeah, remember when we listened to that? I remember that very well, think? does your team have real psychological safety, or are they just cosplaying people who have it? so, uh, what do you let us know in the comments and if you found this discussion useful stick around for our next debate when the commit part of disagree and commit becomes malicious compliance does speak up but let's say your team leadership ignores them anyway and then they demand commitment you know like, like normal, right I'm glad that was in there, get something way worse, I think, you get you get at that point, you something way worse than disagreement you get malicious compliance right, the younger generation has a phrase for that whatever that's the phrase, whatever I'll just go along with whatever you say no, happens when you force people to commit to decisions that they think are you wanna know what stupid decisions, I say stupid decisions because I can't really say what I wanna say on this podcast, right, again, it's a family podcast, that's right, the people don't fight you, they don't quit they do something much worse they let you fail, I was gonna say flail but it came out as fail, but either one works, and then sometimes they say, I told you so very rarely they say that, but they do say that, oh boy, sometimes, if there's one thing Andy Jassy hates, he hates I told you absolutely, that means you didn't speak up hard enough he's looking for a man in finance right, right, right so from a leadership perspective, right let's just see how this might play out if you're a leader in this situation you might say, you know, once we make a decision, we need to get everyone behind it so we need you to give your 100 % right so that's one of the arguments that you'll hear against this, it's like come on, be a team player right, don't be, don't be dissentful, I need your full commitment, not just some half -baked, half -hearted effort, that you're just coming along, get into it right, if you're not fully on board maybe this is not the right team for you maybe you should be working for the you know, mailroom team or whatever oh boy um, yeah, I have seen this in person that's great so, we can talk more about this that's a, that's a, listen everything you just threw out as against points it's uh, it, it, it triggered me and uh, I don't think I can I think I need to go home I need to go cry under my desk listen, ohm professionals execute regardless of their personal opinions, that's right, you're a pro that's such a, right, roll with the punches yeah, oh my goodness so there's, there's a paper and I'm trying to pull actually called organizational cynicism, wow ok, there's a paper from April 1998 called Organizational Cynicism it's James Dean Jr. Pamela Brandes Brandes? Brandes? and Robbie Darwadkar Darwadkar? ok what is the nature of the extremely negative attitudes expressed in so many employees towards their organization to respond to this question, we introduce the concept of Organizational Cynicism I'm familiar with this paper because it came out in the business school studies as well it's an academic paper, but it has real life implications which, when, at the time when I came across it, it was purely just simply an academic paper, right it was a long time, but now you look back and say, hey, look at this those guys nailed it back then if you have access to the whole paper it would be great, I'm trying to see if I can I got it, I got it cool, you wouldn't download a car actually, I would download a car I would, so it's, the original research that I had backing up this section was Dean Brandes and Dar Wadker, 1998 a paper about organizational cynicism I've since found I looked at that paper we read that paper there may have been an edit here and it led us to a better paper from an, from a previous year from 1997 called Understanding and Managing Cynicism about Organizational Change by Rikers, Warnhouse, Wenaus, and Austin um, the paper gives some strategies for managing um, cynicism related to organizations um, related to a lower commitment, job satisfaction and motivation, reduced willingness to engage in future change efforts, lower credibility, everything that we've been talking about here, it says, it lists some strategies for managing uh, those things for the people running the organization to hopefully pick up and some of the strategies uh, evolve around centering on credibility and communication, the authors recommend keeping people involved in decisions that affect them keeping them informed when, why, and how, that kind of thing minimizing surprises using credible spokespersons with positive logical appeals through multiple channels and dealing honestly with past failures, publicizing successes, and seeing change from an employee's perspective giving people opportunities to voice their feelings and receive reassurance and I will link it, and I will link, sorry, I downloaded this one the Rikers Understanding and Managing Cynicism about Organizational Change I downloaded this paper it is 12 pages and I will link it, when I put the podcast up in the description I think the corollary was that it's not enough to have good intentions that management need to really actively um, you know, pursue opportunities for um, people to provide their feedback basically right, right, yeah so the, in this category, I mean takeaway here is if you're the leader and you're demanding commitment you know, oh, we just need to make this decision oh, we need to, you know, not we need to stop talking about it um, there are warning signs, uh, that you need to watch out for, because, your team is gonna rebel on you, and then you're gonna get whatever that entails, I mean there might be ropes involved, it could be whatever, guillotines, I don't know, I don't know what's things to watch out for here, that the team is entering malicious compliance territory is, number one, people they stop offering, uh alternate opinions uh, they stop playing devil's advocate they just, they just are quiet generally, number one number two, when problems arise uh, nobody flags problems early, I've seen this on many a bug fighting, firefighting team number three, post mortems and retrospectives have a very weird energy yeah, so, it's hard to put a finger on it, but weird energy, if you've been in one of these meetings you know what we're talking about it is weird in the sense that you only ever get people certain people speaking up first of all yeah and then when they do speak up they're simply double clicking on the things that they know are sure bets that's it right so yeah it's it's weird for sure so we talked about you know this uh in this segment uh malicious compliance um and that's the effect that happens at the team level but if we're gonna go up to a macro level beyond that like what we learned about on and like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, game of weaponized disagree and commit it's not just useful so here's the long for shutting people up in the moment uh, the years it when applied over institutionalizes this behavior and systematically promotes people who never disagreed in the first place so and suddenly your leadership team becomes really just nothing but people that are uh, yes men nobody dissents because the price for doing that is pretty steep that's right, uh, and uh, I'm glad you said yes men because that's exactly what the women don't stick around in this culture there we go sadly, sadly have a slide for the citations, so we did a whole podcast on the fact that power fundamentally rewires the brain and degrades empathy, uh, we and we reiterated it in the last podcast, or one of the last podcasts that went up, but the Arguing Agile 243, how corporate turns good people bad, the neuroscience of power and corruption boy, that was a mouthful that podcast that we talked all about the research, we're not gonna rehash it here, but if you but, I feel we're gonna slightly touch on it in this category, just to point out you're gonna hear certain arguments and those arguments are gonna sound very familiar to what you heard on it's weird, I don't 243, you're gonna hear leaders got here by having all the contacts and being right most of the time, more more, they're more right than anyone else in the organization, that kind of thing um and then, uh, oh, if you want to lead you gotta show that you can make decisions fast and get people to align they're gonna give you these kind of excuses you know, they, we, I earn this position by you know, getting all these decisions but but they are what you come across, for sure yeah, you will hear them, I mean, again, going back to going back to our Arguing Agile 243 podcast how corporate turns good people bad like, gaining authority over other people, it reduces empathy, it reduces your brain's empathy, they put the special testing hat on people and measured their brain responses and found when they should have empathy to certain things they don't yeah, it's physiologically proven absolutely, yeah, that's very true so this is not, wild assumptions or whatever this is just what having extra power does, and in that podcast in 243, the way in that podcast that we said that you can go about counteracting this very real phenomenon is to enact some things in your environment to, because you're a leader at that point, like your words carry power and people kind of hang on them so you have two choices you can just ride that and be people people listen to me anyway and they just do whatever I say without questioning it, so I can just be on easy street right, just dictate things that need to happen the other side of it is you can deploy some systems to make sure that your empathy does not get degraded when you end up reaching a leadership or managerial position in these organizations number one is you can especially if you're the manager and you don't really know the other people in the organization, maybe you're new in the organization there's some things you can do, these are a little bit different than our normal suggestions ok, so number one here is you can assign someone so you're in, you're the leader now let's say you're the CEO argue the opposite position in every decision, so you're making, you're turning dissent the dissenting voice you're turning into a someone playing assign someone to the role you're not having someone assume a risk and that is a powerful thing to do culturally that i've not seen anyone institutionalize but it was an interesting idea and people love playing the role, I just want to say people, people do, people love playing the role because at the end of the day, your downside, at least to you is limited, because you're playing the role you don't have as much skin in the game, right, one of the things that, I like this kind of double click on, is you know, track who warned you about these failures that you, you listen to people, hopefully you listen to them in the first place, but track who warned you about these, even though you discarded, you know, all of them, or most of them at the time, and uh, figure out at the rations before you promote, meaning, if they said something, even if you discarded their opinions at the time, and it turned out to be true, don't let that be a, um, you know, don't let that be a judgment on them let it be a judgment on you because you discarded it but then not necessarily to punish yourself but to learn from it to say, well, what would I have done differently right, and I think that's very, very powerful um, before you commit to a decision, maybe you should ask yourself the question what would have to be true for this to be wrong what if this didn't pan out the way we sang it would so there's two things happening now in our suggestions so the idea that you're gonna assign the devil's advocate role to somebody and say, hey, you, you are the one who does not believe this please ask for evidence at, you know, ask critical questions we need somebody at the table doing the critical thinking assuming that nobody at the table is gonna be doing critical, critical thinking and as part of your critical thinking job you have to ask what, what would have to be true for this course of action that we're all agreeing on because we're all, we're all we're all polite people we don't wanna upset the apple cart yeah we don't wanna cause a fuss right um, what would have to be true for our decision to be wrong right, those two things go together in the role, so that role is encompassing of those two things, the other one that you point out that it's, it's in my notes and I even said in the in the podcast prep, I'm like, we're not sure about this one, like, it's, it's the idea that you should somehow be tracking, who are my managers cause that's probably what it is, right, who are my managers who are my people that are pushing back and trying to help us make the best decision because that people are continually like, you're making sure having a backbone and disagreeing before they commit and then committing but you're kind of tracking that because you, because at a lot of organizations the people that will get promoted are usually the people that never push back and commit they're not the people that disagree and commit, the people that never push back and commit because they're team players they're your buddies they're your, you know, they're they're quote aligned, but the issue is like, are people just sucking up to you like, is this like the modern equivalent of brown nosing where people never push back on any decision and just buy their time you know what I mean, no matter how crazy the decision is or destructive to the organization or how much it hurts people or how many thousands of, 30 thousands of people that you lay off bottom one is you're that's the, the promoting those people who never push back because you have a good feeling about them but you have a good feeling because you never get into conflict with them they're your buddies that are always there for the good times and then when tough times happen, they're never there because they just don't want to deal with that boy, oh boy, they're the people that didn't want Caesar to look over his shoulder so, ok let's just share a little bit of you know, like, practical things what can you do about these things? maybe, if you're not the person who would who can take both sides and say, hey you know, how about I ask the question as a leader yeah, what would have to be true for this to go wrong by all means, empower somebody to do that in your team, that's the first thing, you know looking at failures are they failures, or are they learning opportunities, right, so again, this is not the podcast for that but if you have a heat map of somebody who is always speaking up against the grain, I'll just say that, um, don't look at that person as the troublemaker, right, I mean, yes, they can be, but they're not necessarily the troublemaker because they're raising these things, so have them in a higher regard in your psyche than you otherwise would, because they might be giving you those views, you're not seeing everything that's in your blind spots, right, and if these are the people that are raising these things, you should value those people, first of all, and not punish them, so don't um, you know, don't punish them by saying, well, if you reach the conclusion that I have, you're great right, and otherwise, you're just a troublemaker, I mean it's one thing to say and every, every organization I've worked at says this we value diversity of opinions uh, yeah, it's a great slogan they don't really they, they value diversity of opinions as long as all those opinions align to their opinions converge to what they believe in the first place yeah, exactly exactly um, so, you know, I think if you're a leader who really wants to understand where things are at you should unravels some of these things, maybe um, you know, and then look at that is this a, a lack of mean, also, a good introspective first question would be, if you're the CEO, you wake up one day and you realize nobody ever disagrees with you the first people you should turn to your left and your right should be the other members of the executive team on the board, yeah, just to say, how come none of these people, just cause you might have, you might realize that you're surrounded by yes men and now, you, you realize you have a bigger problem than you initially thought, right, that you have to deal with and, yeah, maybe like if one person listens to our podcast and realizes oh, I, like, I have a big problem here great, great mission accomplished, time well spent, yeah, absolutely yes, alright, speaking of time well spent, have you watched your company's leadership become more and more spineless over time with paper -thin egos, um, that's what I'm saying right now, let us know in the comments, and if you're not afraid to get fired let us know in the comments, and uh, if you found this useful stick around for our final debate on what you can actually do about everything we talked about today alright spent a good amount of time on this podcast tearing apart poorly alright, um, we've implemented disagree and commit practices Spotify versions of poorly copy -paste Disagree and Commit sorry, sorry listen to our Spotify podcast for more but we are not here to just complain like, that's not what we're doing on the podcast today let's talk alternatives, ok what should happen instead and I'll warn you now there's one non-negotiable thing that leaders are absolutely gonna hate that we're gonna talk about here in this conversation, that's right, ohm I'm talking about that one leadership trick that uh, wait, what am I saying, look, that that one trick that leaders all hate is that what I'm saying for YouTube right now? pretty much, I don't know, anyway, look I'm not saying that we should have endless debates and never make decisions and that, you know speed doesn't matter and alignment doesn't matter, I'm not saying any of that, ok but I have a single line in the sand as a product manager with regard to disagreeing commit, ok if you're gonna lift disagree and commit out of amazon and drop it into your insurance company your fintech bro company or whatever cool you can do your lifted version of disagree and commit, uh it needs to include a mandatory re-examination of the decision and the leader saying, I was wrong if the evidence points out that they were wrong like, otherwise you're not using disagree and commit as a decision making tool, like Andy Jesse said at the beginning of this podcast that we listened to you're using it as a weapon to shut people up and you are gonna be put on my arguing agile pedestal of the exact, like I'll take a picture of you put you right here in the middle of the screen is the exact reason that we are having this podcast because most people mess up this principle and they use it exactly like what i'm talking about right now yeah absolutely so i would urge the listeners and uh people that are watching to think about the last time they had a leader come into the meeting that they're in whatever meeting it might be possibly a town hall it doesn't matter and say we made a decision right and that was, I thought I was wrong, I'll wait it doesn't happen, because typically what happens instead is this decision got made because of your input, collectively um, if you're lucky otherwise it's, you know, a person um, and it failed because you, whoever it is right, fill in the blank, didn't do something right, so it immediately bounces back and they double down on basically blaming somebody now, that has been my experience over the last, you know, 25 plus years of being in the business. if you ever have a person who is a leader that says, we made a decision, you guys provided the input, I cast the final vote, and we were wrong, and it was my fault, can we pivot now? What opinions do you have now? What's your feedback? You are onto a company and a leader that really cares, but if that happened to you, please, do let us know in the comments, because i really am not expecting that many comments, honestly i mean, so, what you probably will expect, home, is the leader who never admits quote, i was wrong always have to pretend that they're confident in all their decisions and what you're pointing out is that, uh, these individuals are cowards and they are hiding behind hierarchy and authority, going back to what we just talked about, the arguing agile 243, I think it was 243, 243, yes about, uh, how power corrupts a brain we might not have put exactly into words from arguing agile 243 but power allows this low accountability situation that you're describing where they can shoot off at the mouth demand certain things and never have to revisit why they were wrong, I mean, eventually eventually they'll have to explain it to C -level executives to explain it down, that's not the way that it works, and but, they don't have that's the reason for all those studies that we examine on that podcast ok so, if you're looking for resolution in this category it's not going to happen, the best you can do, no fix for this is going to work unless you have when decisions are made, unless you have a scheduled re-examination of the original assumptions and decision and we talked about in, in, um I talked about this in product management you get your quarterly group together, your off-site, that kind of thing you talk about the big strategy level not tactics, strategy level plays, because that would be the appropriate time to examine your business strategies and decide to pivot, because things are not working the way that you expected them to work, so that would be the time to say, this is what we thought these are the numbers this is what i'm suggesting remember these are the product managers at this point right and then it's up to the panel that you convene it's probably some members of leadership that kind of thing maybe it's a finance person maybe it's investors you're showing this information out in the open, being as transparent as possible the funny business works this way when you have layers of the organization and everyone's trying to hide, failures rather than learning from them and adapting you try to hide them and disguise them and say, no, all of our decisions were right, nothing to see here and that's where, that's where all of this starts falling apart yeah, I think in those organizations failures are basically you know, punished, basically they're not, they're not seen as opportunities, uh, you know, to learn from, right, um but some of the pushbacks that you'll possibly come across against this would be we don't have time for a perfect process we can, good enough's good enough let's just go with this we have to make a call, we have to be fast here yeah, yeah, and then when when something does go wrong based on the evidence we just newly learned, right, we have time to go back and examine every decision we made you my favorite of everything is if, ohm, if you admit that you're wrong then people will stop believing in your decision making ability you know what I mean, if you, if you admit that you're wrong it'll undermine your decision making ability as a leader yeah, yeah, sad, and so it's one of my failures too, as I have, because what what people do, what leaders do is, they double down on this, that's, first of all I just want to point out for anyone listening, how bananas that, it just absolutely, absolutely uh statement yeah, bananas that the disagree and commit without accountability it's, it's disagree, and then forget you disagreed, basically disagree and sacrifice the person that feels, look, I I will, people probably already are aware of this, but uh, you know, uh, The Outer War by, uh, Sun Tzu great book, right it was written many, many years ago and it is still I'd say almost perfectly relevant to the way we do business today so, I would recommend that to you uh, take that for what it's worth but that book is on my nightstand and I frequently visit that one of my habits is to just open the book at a random page and read it and just try to contextualize that with what I'm facing day in day out from a professional standpoint and let me tell you nine times out of ten if not ten times out of ten it perfectly aligns there you go let's talk, let's talk takeaways in this category, so, I have I have owned what I drafted as the disagree and commit bill of rights for anyone who is not working at Amazon, sorry, that was too many words for me to fit on one slide so I put it on here, ok number one, you have the right to be heard your concerns must be actively engaged with, not just acknowledged ok, number two, you have the right to a checkpoint there's gotta be a scheduled moment to revisit the decision uh, when new evidence comes up, or evidence of any kind comes up, because again, most decisions are just assumptions when you make the decision yeah, just to clarify, when you say scheduled moment, you just mean you just mean that the moment the evidence surfaces, not like a calendar schedule, right, yeah, right the moment something comes up, hey, let's all huddle together and re -examine this thing that we said we would do or we're doing, right makes sense to me, it could be that, it could be like hey, we made this decision, we're gonna give it a week to gather the research that we need and then we'll meet here again next week but you're, but you're informed with new data, correct, yes, right, perfect, yeah that works, other things here is number three is the right to quote i was wrong to say if your concerns are proven valid the leader must acknowledge it publicly and this one is the one where most quote leaders would rather crawl over a field of broken glass naked right i was gonna say walk over on all fours over hot coal but yeah nick uh this works right this is one of the four that is i think the most difficult for leaders to embody to say hey uh, I was wrong that's point is the right to safety, raising concerns cannot result in formal or informal punishment, and I feel that category is HR people will be all up in arms saying, oh no you gotta raise it in the right way, you gotta bring your concerns and the last bananas up in the proper way, through the proper channels, and then they'll throw a bunch of rules at you that you, there's no way you can comply with and that's the end of the game for you at that company so, yeah, are we playing games are we trying to be successful in the market you can only do one, pick one, I'll wait right, yeah, do let us know, what's the worst misuse of disagree and commit that you've ever seen, or the best we want to hear your voices so let us know, that's right, that's right and let us know in the comments if you've ever heard that from your leader at a re-review of the evidence based on a decision you've already talked about so let us know, we have quite literally never seen it before, but we're willing to see it one time in the comments, alright let's let's wrap up this podcast, you have any, final thoughts here? yeah, a couple of thoughts you've been in your organization, hopefully for a little bit try and reflect on who says that they were wrong for these decisions who actually welcomes your dissenting opinions and if you come up with nothing I would say at this point in the podcast that sage advice we always give you guys, right? keep that resume updated I disagree and commit is one of those things that I always hear translated in my brain into disagree and shh, be quiet yes yeah, but you know, but the the, I think, I've I think this is one of those podcasts where between the research and the actual discussion I think I actually have softened my opinion in that at least the Spotify model never existed Disagree and Commit actively exists slash existed at Amazon, they did try to do it, it is their core principle and Jesse's on their main website talking about it and you're trying to lift that principle and so you're trying to lift it out of your out of Amazon's culture drop it into your culture but you're also not not dropping in a core tenant of psychological safety and and making your leaders responsible right for shepherding this thing along so I kind of think like I give this believe it or not, I give this a lot more leniency than I give the Spotify model, in that it actually works at a single, one single company in the world did work anyway, I don't know, maybe after they laid off 60,000 people, I don't know if they still do it or not, but it actually did work for a moment in time at one company I concur with that you know, I think if you are looking to lift and shift and install the part spotify model, you know it was never a thing at spotify at least with this, like you said it was a, you know, it was a, it was a thing at one point in time at least, maybe it is now maybe it isn't, I don't know um, but also remember every company has a unique DNA you are not spotify your organization is not spotify and you are also not amazon so take that for what it's worth, and let us know what you think about this podcast down in the comments below like and subscribe, and let us know about any other topics you want us to delve into and