> Disagree and commit: I hate that this is such a common thought process. This is something that makes sense for soldiers in the military. But outside of this context (being a low-information cog in a gigantic machine), it's terrible. If you can't convince domain experts that the plan is sound, then maybe it's a bad plan. Honestly, disagree and commit goes against my... > Theory for excellence.
In most teams, not everyone is on the same page:
- There are people with varying levels of experience, some may not currently have enough background to fully understand all the aspects that a plan addresses.
- Many/most people have the tendency to let their various biases creep into team-level decision-making. For instance, if someone had a bad experience on a previous team using technology X, they are less likely to support using X today independent of X's suitability for the current situation. And people tend to have a massive bias towards their own ideas rather than others' - so when two competing ideas are presented, one's own ideas are often preferred to others' ideas.
- Especially in larger organizations, there may be political motivations for pursuing one plan over another plan - both for management and for workers. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" and "resume-driven development" and "launches get promo more than landings" are a few examples that come to mind that I've seen.
Unless you're on a golden A-team of contributors who are all incredible and on the same wavelength (this does happen sometimes! if so, cherish it!), you're going to have a mix of people with a mix of motivations+biases+experiences, incapable of reaching consensus around the "true" best plan in a reasonable amount of time.
Making decisions in a reasonable amount of time is CRUCIAL to team performance. Obviously, sometimes you make a bad decision quickly when you might have arrived at a good decision with more deliberation+debate+waiting for consensus. But in my experience, the benefit of avoiding these "bad" decisions from time to time is dramatically outweighed by a team's ability to decide very on things very quickly and commit to a plan (and therefore execute).
Famously, section 5.11 of the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] describes some pretty timeless ways to ruin an organization's productivity - all kinds of behavior that are kind of indistinguishable from the behavior I've seen arise from "disagreeing and not committing" in organizations.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...