Your circus, your monkeys: making good decisions

Making decisions is hard, especially when they involve more than one person.

The 2 principles for making good decisions in a group are:

1. Avoid compromises.
2. Align autonomy and responsibility.

Warning: This is a topic I really like, which ironically means there's gonna be a lot of "I hate [X]" in it.

When we decide to stagnate

I'm a double-boomerang. People Operations is full of funny terms for candidates and employees: boomerang, silver-medalist, unicorn, flight risk. Boomerang is someone who leaves a company, then comes back. I've done that twice now.

When I came back to one of those companies, our Engineering department was running into a problem: decisions weren't being made because for every big decision, there was always someone who disagreed with it.

It was growing pains: we were maybe 20 people in Engineering by then, and the legwork necessary to discuss, get input, and adjust proposals with everybody didn't scale. We also didn't want to decree top-down decisions. So we were stagnating.

Not making a decision is still a decision. Due to our status quo bias, we often choose to keep things as they are, favoring stagnation over change. Which is not good.

There's a nice quote about this from Greg McKown’s Essentialism on his poor choice of going to law school by not choosing something else:

“If you could do only one thing with your life right now, what would you do?” The result was that piece of paper on which law school, [which he was doing now,] was not written.

Up to that point I had always known logically that I could choose not to study law. But emotionally it had never been an option. That’s when I realized that in sacrificing my power to choose I had made a choice — a bad one. By refusing to choose “not law school,” I had chosen law school — not because I actually or actively wanted to be there, but by default. I think that’s when I first realized that when we surrender our ability to choose, something or someone else will step in to choose for us.

Mckeown, Greg . Essentialism (pp. 34-35). Crown. Kindle Edition.

When we make easy decisions, they're usually in two categories:

1. Staying the course.
2. Consensus.

And I hate consensus.

And so did Bill Campbell.

Can we all agree that consensus is bad?

Bill hated that. He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus (“I hate consensus!” he would growl), intuitively understanding what numerous academic studies have shown: that the goal of consensus leads to “groupthink” and inferior decisions.

Schmidt, Eric; Rosenberg, Jonathan; Eagle, Alan. Trillion Dollar Coach (p. 54). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Most good decisions are NOT "no-brainers" and should raise objections. If the only decisions you're making are passing by consensus, you either have too little diversity, no psychological safety, or are not effectively resolving disagreements.

In all these cases, you're not making as many good decisions as you could, and you will eventually fail – if you're not failing already.

Making good decisions is hard. You have to "decide to decide," put options out there, and actually choose the best one given a complex set of trade-offs.

This difficulty is exacerbated when the decision affects 5 people.. or 20.. or 200!

One challenge with making decisions without consensus is getting people's buy-in when they disagree.

So let me tell you the two things I believe about buy-in:

1. Agreement isn't necessary for buy-in.
2. The goal of involving others is not agreement but to make good decisions.

If you are a leader at any startup, and you think you are able to make good decisions without your team or your department's input, you either 1) haven't been in business long enough, or 2) you're failing and think it's "their fault." – but it's your fault.

Nobody can make good, important decisions involving several people without their input. No exceptions. There's just too much missing information for you to guess correctly as often as you need in order to succeed.

While soliciting input is a critical part of getting buy-in, it's an even more critical part of getting information to decide correctly.

Besides making good decisions, you need to involve people in your decisions because you still need them to carry out the decisions even if they disagree with them, and they won't do it without buy-in.

To get people's buy-in, you need to listen to them, take their input into consideration, and ensure they understand the rationale for the decision they disagreed with.

Most importantly, you need to make the best decision even if others disagree with it.

Never compromise.

Also, I hate compromise.

Can we please find a compromise that sucks for everybody?

Unable to agree on whether to indent with 2 or 4 spaces, the engineers compromised at 3 spaces.
- Dui explaining to engineers why he hates compromise

While consensus is typically reached at no-brainer decisions, compromise is working through disagreements by finding a bad decision on which there's consensus.

I've banned the word "compromise" from my vocabulary, and I want you to ban it from yours, too. I know the word triggers PTSD in one of my mentees, given how many times I've drilled this into his head.

Compromise is typically, dare I say always, a signal that someone is about to propose a bad decision in order to work out a disagreement, by which I mean a suboptimal decision put forth to "make people happy."

Your goal with decisions is not to make people happy – you can't make everybody happy. Your goal with decisions is to make good decisions!

The best way to make good decisions without compromise is to list the competing options explicitly. Avoid hybrids.

Compromises typically look like Frankenstein's monster: a head from A, the arms from B, and legs from C.

Once options are defined, and trade-offs are clearly articulated, then you can go ahead and collectively choose the best option.

But if you have multiple people trying to make a decision, how do you decide who gets to decide?

Your circus, your monkeys

Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy. (Not my circus, not my monkeys)
Polish proverb for "You keep me out of your problems and drama."

Ema, ema, ema, cada um com seus problemas. (Oems, Oems, Oems, everybody with their problems)
Playful Brazilian saying for "I don't care about your problems."

I hate unclear roles and responsibilities.

At startups, it's often not clear whose circus or monkeys we're talking about.

Or worse, you end up taking heat for other people's monkeys. That's no good.

I had a friend say "I just realized that my frustration is that I don't have the autonomy to match the level of scrutiny I'm under." Amen. This typically is a result of autonomy not matching responsibility.

Autonomy and responsibility must go hand-in-hand in order for people to make good decisions. The moment you take autonomy away, you also remove accountability.

Without accountability, you lose one of the biggest safeguards against bad decisions: holding people accountable for the results of their choices.

It can feel scary at first, to give up autonomy and push decisions to other people – like you're losing control from making good decisions.

But you're not "giving up" autonomy; you're "allocating" autonomy where responsibility lies – the best place for it to live.

When you're responsible for something you don't have autonomy for, you're either set to fail (most likely) or destined to succeed (been known to happen).

When autonomy and responsibility are misaligned, you'll be disengaged, and whatever happens, you'll react with a mix of "told you so" and "I, too, wish things were different."

The last thing you want is for the person responsible for an important decision to think, "Not my circus, not my monkeys."

In short: give the monkeys back to whom they belong.

They're not your monkeys anymore.

"A bet is a tax on bullshit" – Alex Tabarrok

Academics have an incentive to cater to the whims of peer reviewers and department chairs — more so than to be accurate. When you bet, though, all you care about is accuracy. The stuff that people are willing to put their money behind is usually going to be better. At the very least, a bet helps to align incentives. “A bet is a tax on bullshit,” the economist Alex Tabarrok wrote in a post that defended me after I got in trouble at The New York Times for challenging the TV pundit Joe Scarborough to a bet on the outcome of the 2012 election.

Silver, Nate. On the Edge (p. 179). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It turns out Nate Silver is quite internet famous, as I learned when recently talking about On the Edge with 3 different people. I didn't know. I was definitely out of the loop, not having been on the internet much and not being as affected by US elections.

Unfortunately, there’s no startup parallel to betting on decisions. I'm also not suggesting you start taking bets on important decisions.

But a good decision feels like a good bet: clear choices, clear reasoning, clear accountability and some risk.

You can’t succeed as a bettor by only taking guaranteed bets, reaching consensus about your bet, or trying to compromise.

If it’s your money, you don’t want somebody else placing your bets. But if they know things you don’t, you definitely want to hear them out before putting your money on the line.

In the end, like betting, making decisions is not about pleasing everyone or finding the middle ground — it’s about learning as much as possible, choosing the best option, and putting your money where your mouth is.