Avoid compromise and clarify goals

Compromise often merges two good proposals into a mediocre one.

Our tendency to compromise has two reasons:

• Unclear goals: A lack of precision in our goals
• Agreeableness: Our wanting to feel good by agreeing

Both reasons will lead to compromise and bad decisions.

Imprecise goals generate opposite ideas on how to achieve them

The team was spiraling.

There was a document on a particular departmental proposal, and several team members posted comments disagreeing with each other.

The disagreements each made sense on their own, but they were all over the map: "Every team needs to pick a domain," "Teams should work together on everything," "Team silos were bad," "Team silos were good," – you get the idea.

I noted many of the disagreements made sense depending on the goal, so I asked:

- What is the goal they're trying to accomplish here?
- The goal is to deliver faster, save money, and invest in the future.

It's common for startups to have several seemingly conflicting goals such as those. Companies, departments, and teams rarely have a single goal.

So my next question was:

- Deliver how much faster, save how much money, and invest how much exactly, and by when?

To get on the same page, you must first have the page

The most common culprits of goals pulling in different directions are variations of "do more" and "spend less."

• Improve efficiency by reducing cost and increasing revenue
• Deliver as quickly as possible with high-quality
• Grow as much as possible while increasing profit

If you have a team invested in Goal A, another in Goal B, and the goals are vague optimizations pulling in different directions, the teams will never agree on how to achieve them.

In order to agree on how achieve the goals, the team must first agree on the goals. Or, as I like saying: "In order to get on the same page, you must first have the page."

While it's tempting to say, "OK, let's find a compromise where we'll do some of the cost-cutting initiatives and some of the growth initiatives," that will lead to poor overarching decisions.

Resist compromise in those situations. Instead, you must find the precise goals on growth and cost-cutting that both team A and team B agree must be achieved.

Once both teams understand in detail both goals that must be achieved, they can finally work together to figure out how to accomplish both goals collectively.

Once teams disagree on the path but agree on the destination, you can work together to find the best path for that destination instead of the path that makes everybody happy.

Compromise is bad but feels good

In the book Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, Jennifer Berger talks about how our minds perceive compromise as "fairness" and feel pleasure doing it, tempting us to pursue it despite poor results:

We are taught as small people that when we disagree, we should compromise. You give a little, I give a little, and eventually we meet in the middle. We see this at work and at home. It doesn’t seem fair for one side or the other side to win, and so we are drawn to having each side lose a little so that we can come together on a legitimate solution.

Lieberman has studied fairness extensively as well, and notes that when we think something is fair, it lights up the dopamine receptors in the brain — exactly the same ones that light up when we have a pleasurable physical experience like eating chocolate. This leads Lieberman to conclude, tongue in cheek, that “fairness tastes like chocolate.”

This means we are built for compromise. Study after study have shown that we will work against our own best interest as long as we believe it would be more fair (or rather less unfair)—and fairness seems to look quite a lot like compromise to our brains. [..]

So while compromise might feel fair, in complex situations it’s often the wrong way to go because compromise tends to merge two options into one. In complexity, having more options is always better, because you can’t possibly know beforehand which options will actually pay off. So the urge to compromise in complexity takes you from two viable options to one potentially mediocre one. Not a win, even if it does taste like chocolate to our brains.

Garvey Berger, Jennifer. Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps (pp. 64-65). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.

In summary, it feels good to compromise because it feels fair, and we are fair people who want to behave fairly and feel good when doing so.

But we must fight this good feeling of compromising if we want to optimize for making good decisions and achieving the best results.

Don't meet in the middle. Meet in the best place.

Whenever there's disagreement, there will be pressure to compromise to resolve it.

1 - When you disagree with your collaborators, first clarify: "What parts of what we're trying to accomplish are unclear to us?"

Clarifying goals will help sort out disagreements, and there's no hope of agreeing on how to achieve the goals until the goals are clear to everybody.

2 - Only once you and your collaborators fully align on goals can you tackle the next question: "What's the best way for us to achieve it collectively?"

By definition, there's only one best way to achieve goals. Your goal is to find it and execute it. Not to make everybody happy.

Keep watch for when you or your collaborator mentions, "Maybe we can find a compromise," and instead push for clarifying the goals and finding the best way to achieve them.

And if your collaborator asks if you can meet in the middle, suggest instead that you should meet in the best place.