Hey, it’s Aaron.
Welcome to all the new folks! I had been sending this 1 email a month to a few friends, moved it onto Beehiiv to make it easier, shared it on LinkedIn, and BOOM…there are hundreds of people signed up.
Your replies to the first one were so kind, and it was great to hear from so many of you. I’ve added a few other friends in my contacts — you’re all leaders in my book, but if you don’t want it, just hit unsubscribe — no hard feelings.
Right now, as you read this, I’m on a boat in the Mediterranean. For the first time ever! About a year ago, my wife and I planned this particular adventure. We’re calling it our “graduation trip” — her from a psychology degree (she’s becoming a counselor with an emphasis in adoption trauma), and me from leading Riskalyze.
This year off the bullet train has been an incredible gift, and the trip is our capstone. The opportunity to take time and space to look out at the world, learn about new things, and dream big dreams has been really incredible.
Right after I land back in the US, I turn around and head to Nashville to support my Nitrogen teammates at the Fearless Investing Summit. Will I see you there?
Remember, leadership is supposed to be contagious. I hope you enjoy this month’s installment.
How to Head Off a Dysfunctional Culture: Disagree and Commit
If you’ve ever worked in a truly dysfunctional culture, you can spot the telltale signs a mile away.
Meetings drag on with zero decisions made. Or even worse, people politely agree with each other, and then you see them in the hallway having a “meeting after the meeting” to confirm their true feelings. Decisions you thought were made are subtly undermined for weeks and eventually become unrecognizable.
This type of culture is a disaster—it’s horrible to work in, causes great people to leave, and systematically blocks forward progress in achieving the company’s goals.
To combat this at Riskalyze, I implemented a powerful management framework called “Disagree and Commit.” I can’t take credit for it — most people believe the legendary Andy Grove of Intel was the inventor. It can be a superpower for your organization.
The premise is simple.
You have a duty to voice your disagreement if you disagree, and you have a responsibility to commit to the decision once it is made.
Let’s unpack it.
How to Disagree
Perhaps your impression of your organization is that you have no lack of disagreement. Perhaps your culture is even built on arguing! But I’d challenge you to look again. In most organizations, 20% of the people do the disagreeing, and 80% largely go along with the flow.
A few years into our journey, we had a decision to make at Riskalyze. I don’t recall the precise decision, but it was a clear choice between A or B. I walked into the meeting we’d scheduled to decide the issue, fairly certain that A was the right answer.
That said, I had long since learned that my CEO title would often cause people to shift their opinions. So I kept my cards close to my vest, and I turned to the person on my left (after all, we read from left to right!) and asked them to share their perspective first.
They made a strong case for A, and then we proceeded down the table. A, A, A, A, A, A, A. Every person in the room really felt that A was the right answer. And of course, given that this coincided with my prior belief that A was correct, I was feeling pretty good about my CEOing at that point.
Then we reached the final person at the table. Sitting at my right was Micaela Barraza. (Whip smart, I had hired her straight out of college, and she was constantly taking on more as the company grew. She is a phenomenal leader even though she prefers to stay behind the scenes.)
I remember how she started her comments, like it was yesterday.
“Well, clearly the consensus in the room is to choose A, but I have to confess that I walked in thinking that B was the right answer, and here’s why.”
Micaela then proceeded to systematically destroy any logical basis for choosing A as our answer. She’d done her homework, she’d thought about things many of us hadn’t, and the room was electric — everybody could sense that she’d just changed most or all of the minds in the room.
We chose B.
I tell this story not just to pay a compliment to an executive I admire (and hope to work with again someday), but to perfectly demonstrate how the “Disagree” part of this framework is meant to work.
It took courage to advocate for B after an onslaught of As flooded the room. It would have been easier for Micaela to stay quiet, tell herself “this ship has sailed” and say “I’m good with A…let’s proceed.”
Instead, she had the courage to voice her disagreement when she disagreed, and truly contribute value to her team.
This was so instructive for me that I started telling this story in the Mission and Values training I would lead for all of our new hires, and I would use very strong language — I’d tell people they were effectively committing fraud if they didn’t follow Micaela’s example.
When eyebrows raised, I’d explain. “You were hired to contribute your intelligence, wisdom, and perspective to this company. You’re getting a pay check every couple weeks in exchange for those contributions. If you refuse to have the courage to voice your disagreement when you disagree, and yet continue to cash the check, aren’t you committing fraud?”
Exercising your duty to voice your disagreement when you disagree means…
Speaking up even when you feel outnumbered
No meetings after the meeting to express our true feelings
No snide remarks after people are out of earshot — if you disagree, say it while they are still there, and explain why
How to Commit
Equally important to the framework is that we must commit to the decision once it is made. We’ve all seen the person who just can’t get over it when a decision didn’t go their way, and they spend the next six months blaming everything that goes wrong on that decision.
To get to the promised land of a great organizational culture, you first need a clear framework for how your organization will make decisions. I find committee-based decision making to be horribly slow and inefficient, but I also find autocratic decision making to be low quality, lacking in context, and eventually, it gets slow too, as that autocrat becomes the bottleneck!
The optimal approach is to appoint one person as the decision maker for any given issue, and they leverage a small group of people to advise on the decision. That might result in a meeting to discuss the impending decision, but those meetings will be way more effective. You know those ones that drag on with no end in sight? It’s usually because there is no clear decision maker in the room!
If you’ve been called upon to advise on the making of a decision, the commit part of this framework requires you to fully embrace the outcome, even if you spent most of the meeting exercising your duty to disagree before the decision went the other way.
I heard this once expressed as “you should be able to articulate the decision as if it was your idea in the first place.”
One important way this happens is in your choice of words — specifically “we” vs. “they.” If Steve’s teammates excitedly send him into a discussion to argue for A, and the decision is ultimately B, the typical thing for Steve to do is walk back to his pod, shake his head, and say “geez, I argued really hard for A, but they chose B.”
What this implicitly communicates is that Steve is not an effective leader in his organization. Is that true? No — his leadership was one of the reasons he was invited to contribute to the decision. Truly committing to the decision means that Steve will instead say “hey everyone, I argued hard for A, but there were some really compelling arguments for B, and ultimately, wedecided B was the best choice for all involved.”
Committing to the decision once it is made means…
Articulating decisions as if they had been your idea in the first place.
Using “we decided” instead of “they decided.”
Not undermining the decision by blaming everything bad that happens on something that didn’t go your way.
Not attempting to reopen or re-litigate the decision without new data and appropriate buy-in from the decision maker.
Bottom Line
Great organizational cultures are forged in the fires of dissent anddecisiveness. They get the best ideas onto the table, question orthodoxy, avoid “loudest person wins,” make high quality decisions, and then execute those decisions with speed, purpose and clarity.
I’m proud of much of what we accomplished at Riskalyze, but one of the things I’m most grateful for is the culture we built — a culture of teamwork, customer focus, high-impact communication, and accountability. We could not have done it without Disagree and Commit.
Raise your expectations for disagreement, and demand commitment to decisions once they’re made — and watch your organization fly.
Many thanks to Donna White and Ethan Pope for reviewing drafts of this essay.
If you want to share this essay with someone, feel free to forward this email, or access it on Medium here.
Best Reads + Listens of the Month
I had spent a lot of time learning about AI, but it wasn’t until I listened to Patrick O’Shaughnessy interview Gavin Baker on Invest Like the Best that I really learned a ton about how some of the AI infrastructure works. So many cool details, like how they have to save their place when training models because the GPUs literally melt down, and they would lose all their progress if they didn’t. Great listen and you’ll really enjoy this podcast.
The other end of the AI spectrum is the super interesting work Bret Taylor is doing at Sierra building AI customer service agents. I’ve long found Bret super interesting — from building Google Maps, to doing a startup and getting acquired by Salesforce, to becoming Marc Benioff’s co-CEO (a job you could not pay me enough to take!), to founding Sierra. His Invest Like the Best interview was a really compelling listen too.
And one more piece on how to think about the unfolding AI revolution — Ben Thompson of Stratechery argues this is going to be an enterprise game before it completely takes over consumers and workers. Interesting historical patterns that he points out…we shall see.
I’m reading a fascinating book right now called Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s already worth recommending. Andy is one of my heroes, as a Hungarian immigrant who fled communism, fought his way to an education, and ended up as one of the founding employees and most effective CEOs Intel has ever had.
If I can help, let me know.
That’s it for this month! As a reminder, I am coaching five CEOs or leadership teams. That’s all I have time for as I head into a new full time mission in 2025.
I don’t think I could have been nearly as effective for my team without the help of a CEO coach. There’s just something about having someone who has walked that journey before as a “safe” sounding board who you can speak freely to.
It looks like I will have one coaching slot available starting in January (one client is about to sell their business!), so if you’re interested in exploring that, click here to learn more about my approach. If you want to chat by Zoom to see if we should work together, just reply back and we’ll do it.
Have a great month!
PS: I’m also going to be in New York City on or about Nov 11-12. If you have something worthwhile we should discuss in person, let me know — if I have any open slots, I’ll definitely try to make it happen. 🙂
