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How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

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Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#21

Post by floydnoel »

Herring wrote: post #13
wavemode wrote: post #6

> I often get "eye rolls" when I say this to developers: You are not going to convince anyone with facts. True in technical leadership and true in life. Engineers are especially prone to this sort of frustration, where you're technically right but socially aren't speaking the right language for your audience.

You need to get a better audience. I recently met a good developer who still thinks Covid was a hoax. Doing my best to avoid him. You think you can just politely work around him -- that's how you get vaccine skeptics dismantling the CDC.

Why? Are they insufferable otherwise? Or is it more that you find it unbearable to tolerate a different opinion? I'm so curious, about both of you. What part does he think was a hoax?

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#23

Post by mathattack »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #5

"I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer. Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice. But sometimes teams can get caught in an endless futile discussion over details that don't matter for the stated goals. In that case, it's *your dut…

Very good point. There’s a big difference between “everyone gets heard” and “everyone gets a veto.”

Breaking ties is part of the leader’s job.

Of course if every issue requires the leader to break the tie, then perhaps there’s either a management issue, and incentive issue, or people don’t understand the strategy.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#24

Post by Herring »

floydnoel wrote: post #21
Herring wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to get a better audience. I recently met a good developer who still thinks Covid was a hoax. Doing my best to avoid him. You think you can just politely work around him -- that's how you get vaccine skeptics dismantling the CDC.

Why? Are they insufferable otherwise? Or is it more that you find it unbearable to tolerate a different opinion? I'm so curious, about both of you. What part does he think was a hoax?

In my experience that's usually just the tip of the iceberg. You've heard the expression "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"? It's like a link broke in a chain, and usually it's many links correlated. Maybe they just distrust expertise, well I have a phd and I assure you it'll come up later. Maybe he's an immigrant from Russia and he just distrusts everything to do with the news, well that's not really fixable except maybe with many years of therapy. And yes it will come up later too. I'm not a professional, I didn't want to ask the specifics or get into the weeds, I just have a developed nose for these things. My brother is into conspiracy theories.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#25

Post by SoftTalker »

dmos62 wrote: post #14
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #5

"I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer. Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice. But sometimes teams can get caught in an endless futile discussion over details that don't matter for the stated goals. In that case, it's *your dut…

Steve Jobs was also known to lock teams in a room until they arrived at a common vision. It's a difficult task, to align everyone, but in my limited experience not doing it resulted in extremely inefficient execution. What's more, people feel belittled and rejected if you disregard their viewpoints. Sometimes you need to get things done regardless of what people feel or think, but you can't sustain that for a long ti…

This is what we do with juries, so there's something to be said for it.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#27

Post by gmfawcett »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #11
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lesson I learned the hard way. When I was a first time manager I had the naive idea that I was going to build consensus for everything and get everyone to come to an agreement naturally. It worked at first with a good team. Then later I inherited a fragment of another team with some older know-it-all engineers who thought everything modern was garbage and we should be doing everything like they did 25 years…

You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere. Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences. https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/

I've often taken inspiration from RFC 2418, "IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures" [1], a rare RFC that defines a human protocol ("rough consensus") rather than a technical one.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2418.html

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#28

Post by wahnfrieden »

cowthulhu wrote: post #19
wahnfrieden wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere. Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences. https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/

I don’t think that is a practical framework for situations where people aren’t already very closely aligned. What happens when a few people are very vocal (and firm) in opposition to basically every change? Having dissenting views is valuable, but not when they have veto power. Additionally, I think that framework is vulnerable to what I refer to as “death by yes but” - when everyone is just piling on amendments and…

Yes it only works when participants have a shared aim

In full sociocracy, it...

> honors the circle’s ability to freely make decisions within its domain. This is key for the organization to remain effective. But it comes at the cost of members not having “consent rights” to every decision the organization makes. Each member will only have those rights for the circles they are a part of.

So it's not necessary to allow people outside that working group to veto or require compulsory followup through objection

There's no perfect solution to organization, everything is a tradeoff. I've also been part of working groups (made of people whose job description is to manage the scope of changes they're proposing) where everyone and the workers impacted by the decisions are in agreement and no impact on cost etc., but the exec decides no change can be made due to personal preference despite disastrous consequence. Or where an exec who abstains from checking in on a working group's efforts nonetheless counters it with shifting and contradictory demands whenever it comes time to take action, requiring going back to the drawing board repeatedly until people simply give up or leave the organization. Or where the exec asks for more data for a proposal, and then doesn't evaluate the data once gathered, leaving no recourse but to give up or leave the organization. We all have stories like this. Hierarchical organizations are also susceptible to paralysis.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#29

Post by hinkley »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #5

"I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer. Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice. But sometimes teams can get caught in an endless futile discussion over details that don't matter for the stated goals. In that case, it's *your dut…

It took a while to emerge but a couple years into my F50 gig we ran into a situation where we had a bus number if 3 in a domain, we all knew that solution A sounds good on paper but is a shitshow in practice, but the rest of the team was still enamored of it and our reasoned explanations just weren’t being persuasive enough.

The popular vote was going to load us up with little emergencies that were going to slow several divisions down and we ended up talking to the bosses and ignoring the vote.

In trying to smooth this over, I realized that the problem is that the people who would be dealing with the consequences of a decision wanted solution C and everyone else wanted solution A. And I think it’s something worth remembering for future indecisions, that the people with skin in the game need to be able to veto a popular vote. If you don’t want the project to lose momentum.

Generally on a large project you will have a bunch of leads all dealing with different domains, and they will reach quorum on major architectural decisions, particularly cross cutting concerns and interfaces between Conway’s Law modularizations. The boss only needs to break ties when a consensus does not emerge. And I mean NEEDS. Second worst boss I ever had refused to break ties and we had an even number of leads, so it happened half a dozen times. We wasted hours every month venting to each other about what we hated about him and one of the regular attendees just about wanted to murder him for that, and have us help him hide the body.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#30

Post by 9rx »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #5

"I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer. Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice. But sometimes teams can get caught in an endless futile discussion over details that don't matter for the stated goals. In that case, it's *your dut…

> "I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way"

"Okay. Let me know when you are done with that."

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