Everyday Reflections

“Teams have to eliminate ambiguity and interpretation when it comes to success.”

— Patrick Lencioni

Map out lay of the land

Assess the battle field and take stock of what you are dealing with.

• Talk to involved teams to understand what the problems at hand are, and rough sketches of what the solution might look like. Particularly focus on the points of confusion or disagreement whose existence are at the root of this problem being deeply ambiguous, e.g. data locality is important, for sure, but wouldn’t it be better to delay solving it until we have clearer requirements?
• Debug the gaps in cross-functional awareness and partnership that are making this difficult to resolve. You’re not looking to assign blame, simply to diagnosis the areas where you’ll need to dig in to resolve perceived tradeoffs.
• Identify who the key stakeholders are, and also the potential executive sponsors for this work, e.g. the General Counsel, Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Product Officer

Develop Approaches to Navigate

• Cluster the potential approaches and develop a clear vocabulary for the clusters and general properties of each approach.
• Develop the core tradeoffs to be made in the various approaches. It helps to be very specific, because getting agreement across stakeholders who don’t understand the implications will usually backfire on you.
• Talk to folks solving similar problems at other companies. I

Drive the outcome

• Determine who has the authority to enforce the decision. The right answer is almost always one or more executives. The wrong answer is the person who cares about solving the problem the most (which might well be you, at this point)
• Document a decision making process and ensure stakeholders are aware of that process. No matter how reasonable the process is, some stakeholders may push back on the process, and you should spend time working to build buy-in on the process with those skeptics. Eventually, you will lean on the authorities to hold folks to the process, but they’ll only do that if you’ve already mostly gotten folks aligned
• Follow that process to its end. Slow down as necessary to bring people along, but do promptly escalate on anyone who withholds their consent from the process
• Align on the criteria to reopen this decision. One way that solutions to ambiguous problems die is that the debates are immediately reopened for litigation after the decision is made, and you should strive to prevent that. Generally a reasonable proposal is “material, new information or six months from now”

Keep Moving

• Don’t overreact when you get stuck. If you can’t make progress, then escalate. If escalating doesn’t clarify the path forward, then slow down until circumstances evolve.
• Failing to solve an ambiguous problem is often the only reasonable outcome. The only true failure is if feeling stuck leads you to push so hard that you alienate those working on the problem with you.