Keep the Clowns Out of Email

The basic issue is, you are building a complicated thing, and there are lots of decisions to make, and you have lots of people involved in making those decisions, and sometimes they will disagree. One person will argue for using the size 5 widget, for safety, while another will argue for using the size 4 widget, for ease of use. Really you hope that they will frequently disagree, particularly about the hard decisions that involve real tradeoffs; if they always agree then that is a sign of bigger problems. (A lack of courage or creativity or commitment or intellectual diversity, etc.) If you hire good people who care deeply about their work, their disagreements will be passionate, and they will bring evidence and argument and rhetoric and sarcasm and hyperbole to bear to try to convince their colleagues that they are right. Using the size 5 widget would be the greatest crime against good design and common sense ever perpetrated by mankind, someone will say, if they care enough about widgets.

The tone of their disagreements will probably say something about the culture of your organization. If the disagreements are passionate but respectful, if everyone acknowledges that their colleagues are brilliant and well-intentioned while disagreeing deeply on the right answer, if they can shout at each other all day while remaining friends, then that’s probably a good sign about your process. If the disagreements are hopeless and cynical, if they take the form “I know no one here cares about safety but I’ll just point out again that if you use the size 4 widget everyone will die,” then that’s bad. If you have a large corpus of these disagreements—if you save everything everyone said about every decision in some searchable format—then reviewing it will be revealing.