Episode 15: Radical Candor - Giving Criticism In a Business Environment
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Blue: The Theory of Anything Podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience, and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutsch’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five -star rating on Apple Podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player, or you can Google The Theory of Anything Podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system and giving us a five -star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that. The first is via our podcast host site, Anchor. Just go to anchor.fm -4 -strands. F -O -U -R -S -T -R -A -N -D -S. There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations. If you want to make a one -time donation, go to our blog, which is four strands.org. There is a donation button there that uses PayPal. Thank you. All right. Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast. We have a special guest today, Bart Vanderhagen. Bart is a consultant that works taking principles of critical rationalism and basically preparing theory of knowledge and applying it to the work environment. Today, we’re going to be talking about Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor. I invited Bart to help give feedback on that.
[00:01:49] Blue: Bart, would you like to introduce yourself?
[00:01:51] Red: I will. Thank you, Bruce. In any case, for having me, I must say I appreciate your work with the podcast and blogging, so I’m honored to contribute a little bit to it. I’m based in Belgium. I’m a management consultant working with organizations to solve problems around efficiency, effectiveness, all the things that matter in value creation. Indeed, as you pointed out, my approach is heavily based on Poperian epistemology, critical rationalism, and fallibilism, but then translated into a concrete approach for which organizations can start up a process and concrete guides to help them apply those methodologies in the problem -solving endeavors that they’re in. Basically, any kind of problem -solving, but typically linked to the problems that are solved in companies, value creation and the like, but then with this approach that is based on Poperian epistemology.
[00:02:58] Blue: Thank you. I have to tell you, Bart, when I first met him and we started talking, he asks these really simple questions that at least appear simple on the surface about a Poperian theory of knowledge or related topics, and then you stop and you think about and you go, wow, that was a really, really good, deep question. I’m not even sure I know the answer to that question. He really gets you thinking. I was been very impressed with the simple and elegant way he asked questions that get to the bottom of things that I hadn’t even thought about. Anyhow, let’s go ahead and we’ll get into Radical Candor. Radical Candor is a book by Kim Scott. She’s from mostly famous for Google, I guess, but she also worked at Apple and a number of other places. She has a program called Radical Candor which is about implementing criticism and error correction at work, which is why I thought it might be of interest to people who are interested in Poperian epistemology. She doesn’t have a Karl Popper philosophy background though, so any overlap with that is coincidence. That’s maybe not too surprising. I mean, the entire what Karl Popper was trying to do is trying to explain why science works, what theory of knowledge is. Science obviously grew up prior to Karl Popper’s theory of knowledge. He was describing something that was already in existence. So it’s not too surprising that other people come up with some similar sorts of ideas. However, I thought it’d be interesting to also critique those ideas and talk about how there might be ways to improve it.
[00:04:41] Blue: So I am going to go through and I’m going to try to summarize her entire framework and just kind of one slide at a time picking out an area that I thought was a really good summary of what she’s trying to get at. So the first thing is the radical candor framework itself. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, where you can actually see it, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. If not, let me describe it here. The idea is that you have four quadrants with two axes. One axis is care personally, and one is challenged directly. And then she’s using those two whether if you don’t care personally and you don’t challenge directly, then what you’re doing is manipulative insincerity. You say things that you don’t mean to manipulate others to do what you want. And people tend to detect that you’re insincere and things like that. So obviously that’s bad. If you care personally, but you don’t challenge directly, she calls that ruinous empathy. And so ruinous empathy, she says, is just as bad or worse than manipulative insincerity. The reason why you do ruinous empathy is you’re hiding your true feelings to avoid hurting people, but then you don’t ever actually get them to correct their errors. And so the errors pile up and things get worse. So she says that it usually has a good motive. You’re trying to avoid hurting people’s feelings, but the bend result is not just bad for your company, but it’s bad for the person also because they never really understand what it is that was causing problems or how they were affecting other people. If you challenge directly, but you don’t care personally, she calls that obnoxious aggression.
[00:06:19] Blue: She says it’s the second best one. It’s interesting that she says that because the person at least figures out what they’re doing wrong and how to correct it, but then you’re just being obnoxious to them. It might cause friction or bad feelings, make the work environment a less enjoyable work environment. And then if you care personally and you challenge directly, she originally called that radical candor, but now she calls it compassionate candor. And so that’s the idea that you’re doing the error correction and giving the criticism that’s necessary, but that you’re really caring about the other person’s feelings so that they understand and they want to help. They want to change things along those lines. So let me go ahead and turn it over to you guys. Kind of give me your thoughts on this initial framework here.
[00:07:06] Red: Okay. So yeah, my first thoughts, I like the visualization. You’re getting two very relevant axes, the personal axes and the content axes, and you’re building like four alternatives of which the compassionate candor, if you compare them to the three others, is obviously the one that holds the most potential. So I’m interested. I was interested and intrigued already from this graph simply because the other three alternatives are not the ones that you can attach a lot of value to, especially in complex problem situation where there’s a lot of cooperation that is required for long periods of time. Then you quickly know that the other three alternatives aren’t that promising. So it got me intrigued because of one, the framework is exhaustive and within the framework, the compassionate candor seems to be the optimum combination of both the personal and the content side. On that other comment of the second best obnoxious aggression, I guess it’s a little bit culture dependent. I could see that Rune’s empathy could be also a second best culture or a prevailing culture. Depends a little bit on the company culture and the level of directness. I know in Europe, Western Europe, for example, there’s quite a bit of Rune’s empathy cultures in organizations, maybe even more than obnoxious aggression cultures. But I agree that both of them are at best second or third place and it’s the compassionate candor alternative that really from first sight seems to hold the most potential.
[00:09:04] Green: I’ve always thought since very first seeing this framework that she may have missed one thing and it’s hard to have a matrix like this if you need to have five different things. But I think a lot of times the reason that humans don’t give feedback to other humans is maybe I would call it cowardly desire to avoid conflict. And that is never, I’ve never seen that really addressed by her because I think yeah, I’ve avoided conflict because of Rune’s empathy. But sometimes I just don’t want to have the conflict. I either feel cowardly because of various reasons that might not have to do with trying to protect the person, but more with trying to protect myself. A thought that I’ve often had when looking at this matrix.
[00:09:58] Blue: Interesting. Yeah, that actually makes sense to me. Sometimes I just don’t want to put up with the drama. So I just avoid it all together and avoid the conflict avoidance.
[00:10:08] Green: Yeah, that kind of is destroys all of this. Anyway, that just my thoughts there. And I loved what you said.
[00:10:20] Blue: Okay, let’s talk about how Kim Scott suggests going about getting started. Now this is actually one of the things that that really caught my attention when I started first I listened to the book that I went through and read it. She says some things that had been bubbling in the back of my mind that had bothered me and she started to address some of my concerns. And I thought okay, I got to pay attention to what she’s saying here. So one of the things that I’ve noticed is that people like to give criticism like on the internet, not necessarily in a work environment, but we’re kind of quick, especially when we’re dealing with politics or you know, something like that. A lot of times we like to give criticism, right? We want to have our say and and we’re sometimes quite mean about it, right? We’ll try to get what we’re saying out there. And I’ve worked with different groups that have made an attempt to take Karl Popper’s theory and apply it to into their lives. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that they have a tendency to really just jump into criticism, right? Some new person is coming along and they just start criticizing. And that person isn’t part of their culture yet. That person has no idea what’s going on. And they’re trying my impression is is that we often have a tendency to think if we either avoid criticism, we don’t want the drama or we like criticism because and then we tend to think, oh, criticism’s good. I’m giving them the feedback they need, right?
[00:11:54] Blue: And one of the things that she really points out is that that’s not really a great way to launch into creating a culture of criticism. That what you really want to do is you want to start by asking for criticism, not giving it. And that would be how you would start to implement a culture of criticism. And so you’re actively seeking criticism and then you need to reward the criticism. So one of the things I’ve noticed is that people will tend to jump into criticisms and then when somebody counter -criticizes them, they’ll immediately defend themselves. So she talks about how people are going to get turned off by that. They’re going to say, oh, well, they’re not really listening to me. And then you’re going to have shut down the criticism. The thing that she’s getting at, this is my words, not hers, is that error correction is the unmitigated good, not criticism. Criticism is the means of getting to error correction. And you really have to think about how, what do I need to do to create error correction, not so much, how do I go about criticizing? Although she does give advice on that.
[00:12:52] Green: Well, unlike that, Bruce, because the truth is, is, you know, if you’re somebody who believes in continuous improvement, if you don’t have the mechanism to determine what is working and what isn’t working, you don’t have any way to identify concrete improvements that need to be made. And I don’t know if I’d ever really thought about the cruciality of the ability to surface these things so that you can start to move into adjusting your direction. Right. Yeah,
[00:13:29] Red: I think, I also only can agree, I think this is really good, the first point, start by asking for criticism, because it’s definitely a give and take dynamic. People are not, people are not stupid, and they expect that criticism goes in two ways. And especially for managers, you better start it up yourself. You have the authority, and it will be a big mistake to use that authority and start launching criticism in a one direction fashion right away. And so really balancing the asking for criticism and the giving of criticism, I think that’s one of the key criteria for this thing to ever start up in the right fashion and be able to grow into some dynamic that is really fruitful, that is human, and that is eventually getting into optimum error correction at some point. So yeah, really there has to be give and take.
[00:14:31] Blue: All right. The next point she says, give more praise than criticism. I actually have some concerns with this one. And let me, I don’t really disagree with her. It’s easy to see that you really should give more praise than criticism. So it’s not, I’m not taking exception with the point she’s making. I think it’s really hard. And I think it’s one of those things she does spend some time talking about how to try to balance that better. And she’s the first one who I’ve seen say this, who admits that if you just try to turn it into something mechanical, it’s not going to work, right? If you, you know, some people give advice like make sure you give three praise for every one criticism. Well, she gives these funny examples of, you know, you’re really punctual, but your work is terrible, you know, and it’s become silly at some point, because you’re trying to match some number. So I agree with the idea we should give more praise than criticism. But I also think that that is a particularly difficult thing to implement in any way mechanical. It’s almost like a character change is required to really get to be the type of person who you notice good things to say about people and to praise and to give them feedback. She does talk about though, how important praise is as feedback, which is something that I think often gets overlooked. It’s not just a matter of I’m trying to give you praise so that you’ll take criticism and the criticism was what matters.
[00:15:55] Blue: It’s a matter of praise is really important in telling people this is what went right and this is, this is what we need to do more of and that this plays as much a role in error correction and improving your systems in your business as the criticism does.
[00:16:13] Green: Yeah, I think that that’s a pretty important point, you know, not praise as a check mark, but noticing the behaviors that you want to see more of, getting yourself into a mindset where you’re looking for behaviors that exemplify the kinds of things you want to see more of, and then, you know, and acknowledging them. I do this with my children all the time trying to look at when making sure that when they are doing the thing that I want them to do, they know that I see it and that I appreciate it and that I acknowledge that that’s a choice that they’ve made and that’s, you know, that’s if anything practice is going through the act of doing something and then being rewarded by doing it better, even if there’s not actually praise in there, but I think it’s so critical to have a culture of praise if you also want to have a culture of criticism.
[00:17:09] Red: All right, yeah, yeah. I fully agree with that, Camille. The thing I wanted to say about praise is I’m not sure whether you have to give more or less than criticism, that’s another question, but along the lines of what you’ve commented, praise has to be about how somebody did something, and it shouldn’t be about the outcome or the result, because if it’s the outcome or the result, you could have read it in some kind of management report and then just praise the team or the persons who were responsible by saying, well, guys, you’ve achieved a great outcome, but it could be that as a manager, you didn’t show any interest in how they came to that result and people appreciate the praise as like you said with the behaviors. The behaviors are also the way in which that we come to results and it shows the attention that the manager pays to his or her employees, and too often I see that there’s maybe some praise, but it’s only about this outcome or this particular KPI that has been reached and the manager has no clue who actually reached it, which ID contributed to that realization of whom that ID was, how that ID evolved through cooperation. None of all of those things are known to the manager, and when he or she praises then the result, the team even knows that she didn’t or he didn’t know, and so that’s very important in praise. It has to be about behaviors and about how a certain result was achieved, and that’s real strong praise. That is what people will recognize, that is where they will get motivation from, and not so much about just ticking the box or getting some kind of targeted results
[00:19:01] Red: that is realized.
[00:19:03] Blue: I really agree with that. I think about how often I get praised for outcomes and how little it actually means to me, because you get to the end of the project and people say, oh, you did a great job with that project. It worked out well or whatever, and they don’t really know what happened on the project. I know that. They have no idea what we did or how we went about it or what we did well and what we didn’t do well. It does come across very superficial at that point. You’re saying more than that. I’m not trying to boil it down what you’re saying down to just that, but that’s definitely something that I have noticed is that it comes across very superficial if you’re just praising some sort of outcome and then you had played no role. I have no understanding of how that outcome came across.
[00:19:49] Green: Also, if you’re only praising an outcome, that likely means that you’re only praising very occasionally, because the real work happens every day. If you weren’t hearing from somebody that said, I like how you organized this particular stand up today, I felt like it was super efficient, and I really appreciated how you got everything running together. Then you have somebody who’s looking at you in real time as compared to looking at you. Like Bart said, from this upper management umbrella of after everything’s done, oh, good job as compared to actually caring about the day -to -day, which is where the real challenges are.
[00:20:33] Blue: I have a confession here. Are you guys familiar with the book, The One -Minute Manager? I’m not going to try to slam on the book. Let me just say that that book is not very helpful or wasn’t to me, even though it’s trying to say some very similar things to what Kim Scott is saying. It talks about the one -minute praise and the one -minute criticism. The idea is you’re supposed to, when you take on someone and you’re their manager, you’re supposed to first pay lots of attention to them, find something to praise. Now that you’ve done this praise, now you can also give them negative feedback, and then you’re supposed to always keep it to like one minute or less, and you just tell them, this is what I need you to change. What I found, I tried to implement this. I was very young. I was a manager, probably far too young, and I got this book. I was giving this book. This is a great book. You need to follow. I was told that by my company, so I really tried to follow it. First of all, it was really hard to find praise because the way he describes it was so superficial. You just find something, and it felt so much like just a checkbox. It was awkward. Then I tried to do criticism. I’m not upset. I’m not yelling. I’m not mad. I’m just, okay, do this differently. I found people just disliked me. They would say they wanted stuff like that, but it just wasn’t effective.
[00:21:57] Blue: When I look back over my initial attempts to make that work, the thing that was really missing was that the book doesn’t help you understand the need to really care about the person. It’s trying to make it so mechanical, or at least that was the way I interpreted it at the time. The thing that was missing was that people really do need things inside of the concept of a relationship, that you have this work relationship with them, and it’s a personal relationship as well. This is something Kim Scott brings out, that you bring your whole self to work. And I’ve always felt like that approach just didn’t work, and I think instead what I would say today is he’s not getting deep enough into how you actually make praise and criticism effective. He’s talking about trying to keep it short and things like that, and maybe that’s good advice, but he’s missing something deeper.
[00:22:54] Green: This is interesting to me, Bruce, because I would say I had almost the opposite experience. My very first management job, I was 19. I worked at a bagel shop, and it was my very first time managing people, and they gave everybody the one -minute manager. But they also had essentially built so many of their processes, because they had all these young managers running their bagel company, and they had a way that they trained us to use it, and they made the point for us that the critical thing of the one -minute manager isn’t actually about praise or criticism or that sandwiching concept. It’s the step that’s before that, which is the step of setting a clear expectation of the output that you’re trying to achieve, and the behavior that you expect, because then the shortness of the feedback is because you are giving autonomy to the person that you’re giving feedback to, because when you set the clear expectation, you also between the two of you had a contract that you are treating them like an adult who can do these things without needing a lot of help, so that you’ve set this expectation, and now when you’re seeing problems, it’s easy to give them very simple course corrections because the expectations have already been clear, and this kind of heightened level of autonomy is expected. And we used it that way, and we were kind of trained on how to just really quickly course correct.
[00:24:35] Green: It’s kind of a different thing to manage a bunch of college students who are feeding people bagels, but they also had really, really high standards of what they expected for us, like the stores were spotless, the people were super friendly, like it was really, really well run, and maybe the challenges that you had, I didn’t have partially just because I’m super gregarious, and I have this tendency to really I’m super lovey lovey a little bit, so maybe that empathy and that caring that Kim talks about is just kind of part of my personality, and so that wasn’t a challenge for me, but I feel like so much of my success as a manager over the years is because of that framework that I had established with the one -minute manager.
[00:25:23] Blue: Interesting. I can see, I think what you’re getting at is that they tied it into a lot of other institutions that existed for their environment.
[00:25:33] Unknown: Right. And
[00:25:34] Blue: I can see how it could be very useful in that circumstance. Kim Scott talks about implementing institutions later on, and we’ll get to that, but it’s interesting that the idea of it’s tied to autonomy and things like that, that I can see how people would like that, right? It’s making it outcome based. Don’t tell me exactly what to do, things like that. I think you’d like that. Any other, well, I guess there’s two other things that she mentioned that I put on this slide. Getting to know your direct reports and what motivates them, and helping do the work by rolling up your sleeve. So if you’re giving criticism, you’re trying to actually, when possible, help, right? So that it’s not just, you’ve done something wrong, but here, like, how can we help? And she gives the example of, she was in a meeting where she did a presentation and she said um too much, and her manager, I say um, look at that. Her manager said afterwards, I noticed you said um too much. She kind of dismissed it. Finally, the manager gets more direct and says, actually, I don’t think you come across well when you do that. Can I give you coaching? And she directs her to go get coaching within the company, and she’s going to pay for it. Now, maybe not every company can afford to give coaching or something like that, but it’s a good example of how she coupled the criticism with a real desire to help that showed that she cared, right? This is Kim Scott’s manager. I think it was Sheryl Sandberg. It was Sheryl Sandberg in the story. Yeah.
[00:27:02] Blue: And then I liked, I also really liked the fact that she emphasizes it’s your job as the manager to get to know your direct reports. This isn’t about baking cookies, you’re trying to figure out what are their life goals. And then she gives examples of tying in their life goals. Hey, look, how about why give you this position? Because this is going to help you in your future job that I know you’re interested in. You know, you wanted, I can’t remember what the specific example was, but it had nothing to do with the current job. If we give you this job, that’ll start giving you the skills you need to do what it is that your ultimate career goals are. And I really liked that because then that would definitely allow you to be far more effective as a manager. So I felt that was good. Any thoughts on that before I move on?
[00:27:50] Red: Yeah, I would add on the previous last point, getting to know your direct report, one way to do it, and it’s linked to what you’ve mentioned about me in the introduction, is basically ask questions is asking how he or she should or would like to solve a problem or what problems he or she encountered already going into the depths of it a little bit, because it’s only by them bringing insights, them bringing their ideas, them bringing their aspirations and goals that you can start really understanding and working with them. And so that would be the, I guess, the way that I would prefer to get to know them is really by asking questions and see what comes up, see what problems they encounter, what kind of ideas they have, and how they want to pursue them, all those kinds of things. So it could, for me, be relatively close to the to the work environment, to the real and urgent or concrete problems. Interesting. Yes.
[00:28:56] Blue: Okay. All right. Now, why do you need to care? This is something that she spends some time talking about. Typically, when we talk about the need to care about people, particularly in the context and you need to give them criticism, we think in terms of, well, they’ll accept the criticism better. And then she does bring out, look, if you’re in an environment where you get punished for mistakes, then people are going to hide their mistakes. That’s what you’re incentivizing them to do. And so they need to care and need to make it so that criticism isn’t about punishment. Those are kind of the obvious answers to why you need to care. She goes one further, though. Let me kind of pitch this to you guys and see what you think. She talks about the need to achieve more collaboratively, that a bunch of people working on something aren’t individually, aren’t going to be as effective as everybody, kind of understanding everybody else’s mind and knowing them and then working as a single organism, so to speak. She calls it incorporating their thinking into yours and vice versa. And that’s not possible without caring. And so you get more done. That’s the goal of your company, the goal of your company. The reason why a corporation exists is you’re trying to be this super organism, so to speak, that is going to get more done than people individually could get done. So it was in that context that she said, that’s why caring is so important, so that you can incorporate your thinking with each other into each other’s minds.
[00:30:27] Red: Yeah, I think definitely relevant, especially in highly collaborative settings, which are probably most of the settings where IDs confront and clash sometimes, and where attention for people and their IDs is the way to get them more aligned and create more cooperation. Because people touch each other, there’s no way of separating all jobs perfectly into every individual and then get them going and never interact anymore. So interaction is continuous and unavoidable. So yeah, it’s definitely true what’s saying here.
[00:31:18] Green: So Bruce, the people will not admit mistakes if they think they’ll be punished. Kim doesn’t talk a lot about that, does she? I don’t remember her making much of a…
[00:31:31] Blue: Yeah, I think she says it in one line somewhere, and that’s probably my interpretation of what she said.
[00:31:36] Green: Because I think it’s always a little bit of a balancing act when you’re a manager, and you have to… Punishment, some people will view even being criticized as punishment. Punishment, right. And truthfully, if you’re in a management situation, you do have to be willing to… I don’t like the word punished, discipline. Because otherwise, you can’t have… I think that there’s a culture of accountability if people see other people getting away with behavior that’s very far beyond the pale. I mean, there are definitely situations where you need to move beyond even criticism into real solid course correction where you are disciplining somebody for a behavior that is… I don’t want to say dangerous, but just excessive. Her example with Sheryl Sandberg correcting her about how much she says, that was good advice to make her into a better person and make her into a better person within the organization. But that’s a big difference from somebody who’s maybe regularly not submitting critical things or not meeting timelines. I think there’s a variety of different levels, and it’s just interesting to try and find that balance.
[00:33:04] Blue: So let me take a little bit of a tangent here. Something that I’ve noticed, and this is a negative example, not a positive example. Something I’ve noticed is the whole… We call it the blame game, where something has gone wrong and everybody blames everybody else. And it’s interesting, but I have this intuition that the reason why the blame game exists is because it’s spreading blame around in such a way that nobody gets in trouble. And I’ve seen it happen so many times. I had a friend pointed out to me where there was this big mistake made and some hardware was bought that wasn’t necessary, and everybody immediately started blaming everybody else when the CEO got upset. And the CEO just gave up trying to figure out who to blame and moved on. And I kind of believe that’s what the blame game is. If you have an environment where you’re going to get over where somebody’s seeking someone to punish, and really everybody made mistakes that led to this point, that everyone will just simply spread the blame out and then there’ll be no one to blame. And I’m not in any way advocating this. I’m just saying this is something that I’ve seen. And I’ve kind of had this intuition that the issue there is that you could imagine a better environment where people kind of stand up and say, look, I want to do what’s right for the company. I shouldn’t have done this. They’re not trying to take the whole blame for whatever that final bad outcome was. They’re talking about what mistakes they made that helped lead to that. It’s very uncommon that one person is at fault for a bad outcome.
[00:34:47] Blue: And so instead of having the blame game, you would have people standing up trying to figure out how to fix it. And that would be a far more ideal circumstance. And I think a lot of corporate environments just don’t have that environment. They don’t have what Agile calls safety to be able to stand up and talk about what mistakes that they made and what to fix. And so instead you end up with the blame game, which to some degree kind of adversarily gets you to the same spot where nobody gets in trouble and we’ve all blamed each other and now we’re all angry with each other, which is a negative outcome.
[00:35:22] Red: Yeah. The blame game I’ve seen a lot as well. I don’t know whether it’s a concerted or a cooperative effort. I think it’s culture. Some companies, they have a blame culture where people consistently are afraid to speak up, are afraid to go outside of their area of expertise and therefore defend all of what they’re doing inside their area of responsibility and refrain from any engagements outside of their area of responsibility. And it’s a collective. It’s a collective thing. Everybody does that. So you end up indeed with a collective culture of blaming somebody else. And you see it often. It can be induced by the management style. If it has been repressive in the past, if the focus on content expertise is very strong and whether there’s not a lot of experience or learning experience on new problems or more cooperation, then these type of cultures grow into companies and then it becomes indeed some kind of collective phenomenon.
[00:36:38] Blue: The next thing that I’m going to cover from her book is what she calls the getting things done process. Let me just kind of describe it briefly and maybe this will be our last subject for the day and we can pick this up the next time. So one of the things that she talks about is this framework that she has for how you get things done. She gives this example of where she came into Google. She was kind of the adult in the room because everybody else was much younger than her. And so she could see what was wrong. She implemented a change and everybody on her team started quitting. And even though what she implemented was theoretically very good stuff, people didn’t like it. And so they started quitting. And in Google, the manager can’t stop you from switching departments. And when I say quitting, I don’t mean quitting Google, but switching to a different department so they didn’t have to work with her. And Google has a culture and environment where they allow people to do that and the manager can’t stop them. So she went and talked to her boss who may have been Cheryl Sambur, but I don’t remember who it was. And she said, look, what you’re doing is the right things. But you didn’t go about the process. You just implemented it. And so, of course, people disliked it. So she talks about this idea of this getting things done process where it starts with you listen. She mentions that different people have different listening styles. So she mentions the idea of quiet listening where you just listen and you don’t react and it causes people to talk more. Or loud listening where you insist on a response.
[00:38:11] Blue: You put your ideas out there and then you say, look, I’m not leaving here till I have feedback and make people maybe even uncomfortable, but you force them to give you feedback. And then after you’ve listened and you’ve kind of heard the initial feedback, then you clarify this one I think is very interesting. She says it’s really uncommon for an idea to be a good idea right off the back that you need to give ideas a chance to bake before you kill them. So you can imagine kind of a brainstorming session. You’re throwing ideas out there. Most of your ideas are bad. The idea that’s going to turn out to be the winning idea may initially be a bad idea, right? It’s ideas need to evolve over time. So you don’t want to kill it too quick. And this is why she encourages this process to let things kind of more slowly move. So you try to clarify and this actually matches poppers statements about making your ideas sharp, trying to really word them well. So you spend some time trying to figure out how do I help clarify this idea to people and make it easy to understand. Then you open it for debate. Now she mentions the problem with debate is that it could go on forever. So you give like a due date for the debate, right? We’re going to debate this for one week or something like that. And you get everybody to open up and give debate on how this idea or change or whatever it is you’re looking to do is going to be implemented. And you even create an obligation for dissent. If
[00:39:41] Blue: there’s no dissent, then you find someone and you make them the dissenter so that there’s someone who’s arguing against it so that there’s an actual debate going on. Then you decide and she mentions that with decisions, you try not to have the manager make the decision. You want to empower the people closest to the facts to make the decision. So you have to specify who it is that’s going to make the decision and by what date. Then you use persuasion. Once the decision has been made, you come up with how you’re going to persuade the team that this is the right decision. How are you going to present it? Maybe you have a meeting and you’re going to go through and talk about why it’s a good idea, things like that. Then you actually execute it and she says you have to make time to execute it. You have to actually come up with, oh, we’re going to spend this time doing this to make sure that this gets implemented. Then you learn from the implementation and then you repeat the whole process. And you do this over and over again as you maybe that initial implementation has some problems. You need to now solve those problems. You repeat the process to solve the problems. So what are your thoughts on this part for this process here?
[00:40:50] Red: So if I pick some of them, so to clarify, indeed, that’s important. Half -baked IDs should get the chance to evolve. But I think it’s still gently put here. I think they need much more evolution to become or to ever become something very powerful. Depends obviously on the problem you’re solving. This sounds a little bit what you do in, let’s say, weekly stand -up meetings where you have a very short horizon for deciding what to do and coming up with a list of actions. And then, of course, you don’t have to bake an ID of one single action for hours and hours. But IDs may be much broader. They may involve or they may purport two problems that are much broader than just identifying the key actions to be taken in the next week. If they’re broader and if they purport two broader problems, deeper problems, obviously you will have to have much more evolution on a single ID or the first version of the ID. But I think this is more like a process which you run in short stacked meetings, which you do every week, and where basically the problem you’re solving is what are the key actions for this week? And then I think it’s okay to have a short round of clarification because then you can eliminate some of the actions or refine them or complement them without going too deep and too long into the evolution. But it depends on what the question is that you want to solve in those meetings, but clearly important step clarification. And the other thing I wanted to mention is on the debate. Indeed, as you mentioned, it’s a little bit open in the way it’s phrased here.
[00:42:47] Red: The question, of course, is what kind of debate, what is the goal of debate? It’s, I guess, about seeking criticism or identifying potential improvements in some of the IDs. And so that’s important that the debate is also a little bit focused on can we improve the IDs? Can we find errors in it? And then one of the criteria, which I wanted to mention on some of the earlier slides, but it’s basically the definition of criticism or the definition of debate that is aimed at criticism, you have to seek for errors in certain IDs, but IDs that solve a certain problem, obviously, as always. And the criticism should always contain an explanation for why there is an error and to what extent it makes the solution worse and the solution worse in terms of how is the company worse off. And that’s really important to have like a focus or a definition of criticism. If you criticize an ID, you have to have an explanation for why the ID in its current version is not going to make the company better off. It’s not going to yield an improvement at company level. So if I’m giving a silly example, maybe here on, let’s say, we are a team in a company and you’ve produced these slides for our meeting, I could criticize in the following way saying, yeah, I like the slides, but I would prefer you write them in blue because I prefer blue in terms of color. Now, that is criticism that you should roll out right away because I don’t provide an explanation for why the color blue would improve whatever we’re doing here.
[00:44:45] Red: I’m just expressing like a criticism which is not on you personally, Bruce, so it’s already content -related criticism, but it doesn’t relate any way or any how to improving something at the level of the team or at the level of the organization or the company. I do not have an explanation for that. And if you use that as a criterion for debating or for seeking criticism, you can rule out already a significant amount of criticism that is being brought forward, which is not personal, which is content -related, but doesn’t contain an explanation for why, after this criticism, the company is better off or the team is better off or the success is improved and all those kinds of things. So I think you need to have a clear view on what do you mean with criticism? What kind of criticism do you rule out? And if you detect errors, your criticism has to contain an explanation for why with that criticism, collectively, we’re better off.
[00:45:50] Blue: Interesting. I like that. The idea that we can eliminate certain types of criticisms because they need to contain an explanation for how this actually affects the business. Camille, what are your thoughts?
[00:46:02] Green: I really like the half -baked ideas and thinking through those. We’ve been using design sprint methodology for a while and some of this really feeds into the kinds of things that we utilize that I feel like help push us to decisions really quickly when we’re doing kind of immersive workshops. We timebox everything. We timebox every decision and during the courses of those decisions we’re pushing hard for debate. We want people poking holes in ideas and criticizing concepts, not criticizing people, but driving people to have really healthy but also really challenging debates, challenge other people’s assumptions because I think so positively that is the way to get things done is to kind of try and tear ideas apart and then have a point that you’re trying to put them back together. The decide thing is a little bit interesting because I think as a leader sometimes it can be hard to let people decide and I hopefully won’t sound egotistical but sometimes I don’t necessarily want people to decide. Sometimes I think the person who has to own the outcome might need to decide and you know it’s in this context when she’s talking about getting things done.
[00:47:29] Green: I think it is important to give the people who are closest to the facts the ability to decide on the way that they’re going to to fix things or deal with but you know when we do workshops we require a decider to be in the room and typically the decider is some sort of an upper manager who ultimately is going to be the person who is responsible for the P &L or is responsible for you know they’re the person who’s ultimately their head’s going to swing and I kind of like making that person be the one that decides because there’s kind of a beauty in acknowledging that there is a person who’s ultimately going to have to be accountable for the decisions and the outcomes of a team. Anyway, those are my thoughts.
[00:48:21] Blue: You know I have to agree with you on that. I’ve been in your design sprints and I know what you’re talking about here but this is a common principle of trying to get the decider into the room because otherwise you’ll end up humming for a very long period of time if you have a non decider as they try to take things back they’re not even they’re just relaying information to the person who’s going to make the decision right and you can actually destroy a project that way in software. You can actually have the project go off the rails for no reason other than decisions can’t get made. It’s probably
[00:48:55] Green: one of the most common ways that projects get derailed because decisions cannot be made and it’s partially because sometimes people the word empower people it’s not actually easy to be a decider. You have to be willing to be the person who takes the risk upon yourself and a lot of times when you have a group of collaborative people you may see people shying away from making decisions whether because they don’t want to be accountable for the decision or maybe just because they don’t feel like they have the right. It’s hard to empower people to get them to the point that they can choose to own decisions.
[00:49:39] Blue: Yeah. Bart, I was listening to your Pactify podcast and all three of us mentioned kind of this idea of the half -baked idea and there seems to be joint interest on this. You had a podcast episode where you likened Einstein’s original idea and how it evolved over time. Could you maybe explain that a little? I think that’s an interesting related concept here.
[00:50:05] Red: Yes. I thought about that example because I’m doing this podcast about business subjects but I was thinking about the history of how general relativity was developed to really illustrate this baking process by showing that it took it took him eight years from his initial idea. So his first guess he called it the happiest thought of his life which he had in 1907. So two years after he published special relativity he started thinking about gravity and in 1907 he had what he called the happiest thought of life and I consider that as I guess the starting idea for the whole evolution into what eventually became his theory of gravity which he published in 1915. So from his first idea up until the final publication of his field equations in 1915 he took eight years and I don’t know the exact history but I can imagine that he worked quite full time on his theory for eight years. Therefore he probably had other stuff going around as well in his scientific work but I think pretty much the the full eight years were focused on developing general relativity. So you could imagine how many iterations and how many evolved evolutions his initial idea must have had over those eight years and it’s only the final version the field equations the equations for gravity of Einstein that are eventually the ones that have all the explanatory power and prediction power and everything and so before the eight years maybe even you know six months before finishing he was still not there and maybe it could have still failed and maybe he had a crucial
[00:52:15] Red: variation on his ideas the last six months I don’t know but the thing that is fascinating is that it must have been a very intensive effort with an extremely high number of variations on the various ideas that he had to come after eight years and also a lot of mistakes a lot of error corrections before coming eventually to his masterpiece in 1915. So obviously in companies we don’t have all that time but it illustrates that yeah to get to any kind of powerful idea it requires for sure multiple iterations and significant evolution compared to the first version of the idea and typically also you don’t recognize even the first version of the idea when you look at the final theory.
[00:53:10] Blue: Interesting it’s also interesting that the reverse happened with Einstein so after he came up with general relativity became this world famous scientist he wanted to figure out he helped create quantum mechanics also and he wanted to figure out a way to merge general relativity with quantum mechanics so he did the same thing he had an idea he started to pursue it and he ended up dying before finishing the idea but in retrospect we know that he was on the wrong track altogether that it was never going to develop the direction he was going so you can see kind of a the trade -off that has to be made here between you don’t want to kill the idea when it’s still just a bad idea and its evolution may turn it into a good idea but you don’t want to keep pursuing an idea that’s not bearing fruit either and want to discard them move on that’s the idea of putting a due date on a debate.
[00:54:05] Red: Yeah sorry maybe quick there Popper says that as long as you’re making progress you should continue the evolution but obviously then the question is you know what is the level of progress that is sufficiently high to to continue evolution and you may be misled in that assessment but indeed as long as you’re making progress and you’re contributing to a solution that solves the problem don’t stop evolving I would say.
[00:54:35] Blue: All right this is probably a good stopping point we’ll we’ll pick up next next time and we’ll finish up Radical Candor and then move on and maybe talk some more about some of the ideas that that I know Bart teaches as part of what he does so thank you guys for for coming this has been a great conversation.
[00:54:55] Red: Thanks a lot it was great fun.
[00:54:58] Green: I always enjoy it so thank you.
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