Constructive Conflict
Constructive Conflict
The lifeblood of the creative process of company building
TL;DR
Constructive conflict is the lifeblood of the creative process of company building. The culture has to actively promote it, while also providing cognitive safety. Otherwise most of the company's direction will be determined top down and much of the human capital will be wasted.
“Fit” Ideas
Building a company, especially in the early stages, is a creative process that follows a similar pattern to evolution. You try out strategies and the market’s Darwinian forces determine which will survive. As such, you need to be open to experimentation and left field ideas. There are trialed and tested approaches to how to build a company, of course, but the core of what you are building is likely differentiated and therefore novel. To ensure you end up with the “fittest” version of that novel core, you can’t allow for millions of years of evolution to give rise to a neocortex and an opposable thumb but need to quickly decide what works or doesn’t. Of course, the temptation is there to call the shots all by yourself to be fast and that may work sometimes, however, it may not lead to the most optimal strategy. Ideas that have survived “scrutiny” tend to be more robust. Needless to say, given that the people in your company are the most expensive “asset” it would also simply be wasteful to not use their brainpower to gain an edge.
Consensus versus Conflict
One way of doing this would be to debate every move until everyone is convinced, in other words, by seeking consensus. However, as we know it is important in a startup to maximise the pace of execution and decision making as it’s our competitive advantage. One of the key differences between a startup and a corporate is your ability to pack more cycles of iteration into a shorter amount of time. While we do want to test ideas and strategies for their “fitness”, we don’t have enough time to seek consensus at every juncture. As a matter of fact, public authorities and big companies’ for good reason get bogged down by consensus culture. At a certain scale and depending on the context this is the right approach, however at an early stage startup with limited runway, you need to be more efficient than that. There are exceptions of course. Some decision are irreversible and need more general buy-in by the team but reversible decisions need to be taken fast.
Constructive “Conflict”
The idea of conflict doesn’t sit well with most people. We want to get along and are descendants of pro-social monkeys (even if it’s hard to believe that sometimes…the pro-social bit). Though, the word conflict gets a far too bad wrap. Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) who was one of the leading business geniuses of her time put it well: “the mechanical engineer capitalises on friction, the music of the violin we get by friction, we left the savage state when we discovered fire by friction”. She has ample writing on conflict and leadership, which this post has been inspired by. I recommend you seek out her writing, if you want to delve deeper into the topic.
A definition of conflict that fits our context: “a serious incompatibility between two or more opinions, principles, or interests.” This sounds extreme but the more incompatible two opinions/ideas are the more scrutiny is going to be applied to them by the opposing faction. This is exactly what we want, especially if we are going to invest millions based on some ideas/decisions.
Without wanting to veer off into the metaphysical a good philosopher to invoke here is Hegel. I am merely paraphrasing but his Dialectics poses that a thesis meets an antithesis, which leads to a synthesis and so the “Weltgeist” or world spirit becomes more perfect. American Capitalism meets Russian Communism and we get social capitalism in postwar Europe as a synthesis. The clash of opposing ideas leads to a “fitter” more perfect idea. In this spirit we want to create a space in our creative endeavour of company building to produce the fittest strategy.
Cognitive Safety
Certainly most companies do not pursue strictly consensus driven decision making. There are discussions happening in most offices that are trying to calibrate ideas to get to better outcomes. Maybe some brave employees, sometimes in a few of those offices, stand up to their bosses to voice opposition but it takes courage to do that. Good luck getting introverted employees to voice their opinion against the grain. This friction in the process of finding a potentially better idea is suboptimal. If we don’t want to live in an eco chamber or conformity with whatever the highest ranked person in the room is suggesting, we need to create a culture that celebrates organised dissent.
Upending the natural hierarchy of the company org chart needs explicit designing. Often organisations suggest they have open cultures but opposing ideas are ultimately unwelcome. To avoid this hypocrisy the first step is to create a realm of cognitive safety. When every employee in the company feels that they can express their business/product/tech thoughts freely without retaliation in the next performance review or without snarky comments while passing the water cooler, will the full spectrum of ideas available within the minds of your workforce come to the fore. Note that a company that has equal representation of sex, race and sexual orientation can still be one that is not open to opposing thoughts when it comes to business decisions.
No Ego
If you have a culture in which constructive conflicts are embraced, arguments sometimes can get heated. When you eventually chose a side and make a decision, someone will lose out. We’ve all have felt sore or emotional after losing an argument. Obviously, we want to avoid this especially in a business setting as it leads to potential unwanted animosity.
The key to avoiding this, is to build a culture where strong opinions are held lightly. We want arguments to get scrutinised thoroughly, which requires strong opposition. Someone who doesn’t buy into an idea will challenge the very foundation of it. That is a great stress test. However, once the validity of an approach is established the opposition needs to let go of their hopefully lightly held strong opinions. This does require a certain intellectual flexibility but if the team believes in the bigger purpose of the company they should be able to go along with it. It’s important to keep an eye on this and also reward the “losers” for their contributions.
The “losing” opposition needs to abide by the motto that Jeff Bezos made famous but that has been around since democracy itself and that is “I disagree but commit”. Arguments need to end unemotionally once a decision is made. In essence that requires belief in the collective decision making and a suppression of ones ego.
Making a Call
When is an idea/strategy debated sufficiently? The reason we are adopting constructive conflict is to produce better ideas but to also be faster than a consensus culture. So getting bogged down in long discussions would defeat the purpose. Every decision should get the time it deserves.
A good model to use is to place decision into 4 quadrants: cheap reversible, cheap irreversible, expensive reversible and expensive irreversible. Cheap/expensive relates to whatever dimension is the most relevant - i.e. cost, work hours, realignment, etc. Of course very few decisions are truly irreversible but many are de facto irreversible. I.e. changing your company name years into operation is hard; once you pick a certain programming language to build your backend with you are reasonably locked in. Depending on what type of decision you are making you need to allow enough time for it to be sufficiently tested. Rule of thumb, which is grossly simplified, is that you should take hours to make cheap reversible decision, days to make expensive reversible, days to make cheap irreversible and weeks to make expensive irreversible decision. Very few decisions in a startup should take more than 4 weeks.
There are many other things that are relevant for decision making like who should participate, if data is used, how the actual decision is made etc. I will dedicate a full post to this as it is out of scope here.
Embedding Conflict in your Culture
Like with every principle that you want to make a core value of your company, you will have to embed it in the culture. That means you have to be explicit about the fact that dissent (in the right setting) is expected. You want to remind people of this at meetings, off sites, on Slack or when ever there is about to be a discussion that is seeking the full spectrum of ideas.
We don’t want every conversation in the company to be conflict laden and encumbered by discussion. In general, the best thing to do is to set the context for every meeting/call in advance. Broadly speaking you have figure out, decision making, alignment and reporting meetings. Figure out meetings require constructive conflict. Everyone should attend them having received an email or memo that allows them to have a starting position. They should come with the expectation of conflict and discussion - everything goes. The beginning of these meetings should be dedicated to exposition. Everyone should get a few minutes to lay out their ideas without any opposition so that everyone is heard. The bulk of the meeting is then spend discussing with gloves off. A reminder that none of the opposition is personal allows for more openness. Make sure you encourage/prompt introverts to speak their mind. You know your team so bring those into play that need a push. If you feel they didn’t engage despite having potentially good contributions allow them to submit those after the fact. If some arguments get too heated feel free to intervene to calm things down.
Generally decisions shouldn’t be made during a figure out meeting unless it’s a straight forward or cheap reversible problem. You’d have a decision making meeting after the discussion which can consist of a smaller group of people. The outcome should be a clear decision that everyone commits to even if they disagree. These meetings should also be open to constructive conflict as long as it’s clear form the beginning that everyone leaves the room aligned.
Alignment and reporting meetings shouldn’t be conflict based. Once we decide on a path forward we align on the details and once we have results we look at the reporting. As we cycle through iterations the loop begins anew.
Figure out meetings may lead to some good ideas that lose. Put them on an “idea bench” and make that something that in its own right is an achievement. Losing an argument doesn’t mean the contribution needs to be wasted. It’s possible that the decision was wrong and benched ideas will be revisited. You can call out benched ideas in weekly meetings to show that you welcome dissent even if it doesn’t lead to action.
The decision making meetings will need to end in alignment between all participants, even if they have passionately argued for a different path. It’s good to institute a disagree and commit ritual. It takes the sting out of “losing” and just makes it part of the course of decision making. No need to create an elaborate handshake - three knocks on the table by everyone at the end of the meeting can suffice. Whatever it may be it should become a recognisable ritual within the company. This Churchill quote comes to mind: “Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.” People should feel happy about the fact that their ideas were shot down as they have contributed to improving the strategic direction of the company regardless.
As a leader in the company, you need to visibly and publicly loose conflicts. In other words lead by example. Showing that hierarchy loses to good ideas and passionate arguments, ensures that all your employees even potentially introverted rise to the challenge.
All this works best if you have done a good job with hiring. By that I don’t only mean selecting the right folks to join the company but also being explicit about this part of your culture in the hiring process. This allows for people to join with the right expectations. The idea is not to hire only alpha minded employees that want to have impassioned conflicts but to hire people who are comfortable and happy with dissent. This is actually very important to get across to any manager you are hiring as the traditional “the buck stops with me” mentality isn’t conducive to constructive conflict culture.
Conclusion
Conflict sounds like something that should be avoided. The reality is it’s all around us and not utilising it in an organised form at work is a missed opportunity. The alternative is employees who don’t explicitly share their opinion but complain in the shadows about the direction of the company. Give everyone the opportunity to voice their opinion in opposition to yours and celebrate losing ideas - you’ll end up with a “fitter” strategy.