The best answer requires some aggravation
by havoc
Once you think you have a good answer to an important problem, it’s time to drive everyone crazy looking for an even better answer.
Here’s a scenario I’ve been through more times than I can count:
- I thought I had a pretty good approach, or didn’t think anything better was possible, and wasn’t looking to spend more time on the problem.
- Someone had the passion to keep pushing, and we either stayed in the room or kept the email thread going beyond a “reasonable” amount of effort.
- We came up with a much better approach, often reframing the problem to eliminate the tradeoff we were arguing about at first.
Steve Jobs was legendarily cruel about pushing for more. But in my experience good results come from more mundane aggravation; there’s no need to make people cry, but there probably is a need to make them annoyed. Annoyed about spending three extra hours in the meeting room, annoyed about the length of the email thread, annoyed about compromising their artistic vision… if the human mind thinks it already has an answer, it will fight hard not to look for a new answer.
That might be the key: people have to be in so much pain from the long meeting or thread or harsh debate or Jobsian tongue-lashing that they’re willing to explore new ideas and even commit to one.
It shows just how much we hate to change our mind. I often need to be well past dinnertime or half a novel into an email thread before my brain gives up: “I’ll set aside my answer and look for a new one, because that’s the fastest way out of here.”
The feeling that you know the answer already is a misleading feeling, not a fact.
Some people use brainstorming rules, like the improv-inspired “yes, and…” rule, trying to separate generative thinking from critical thinking. First find and explore lots of alternatives, then separately critique them and select one. Avoid sticking on an answer prematurely (before there’s been enough effort generating options). Taking someone else’s idea and saying “I like this part, what about this twist…” can be great mental exercise.
To know you’ve truly found the best decision possible, your team might need to get fed up twice:
- Brainstorm: stay in the room finding more ideas, long after everyone thinks they’re tapped out.
- Decide: stay in the room debating, refining, and arguing until everyone thinks a decision should have been made hours ago.
A feeling of harmony or efficiency probably means you’re making a boring, routine decision. Which is fine, for routine stuff. But if you have an important decision to make, work on it until the whole team wants to kill each other. Grinding out a great decision will feel emotional, difficult, and time-consuming.
In the spirit of this post….
I’d be more than happy to participate in 4 hour meeting for the purpose of annoying you to the point where you retract this post and replace it with a new post that provides a better insight into human nature.
or you could just write down your own opinion (or facts if you have them, my post is pure anecdote) and start a conversation …
I was a little cute with this post I suppose. The main thing is that working on something for a few hours is going to get you farther than just jumping to a fast answer. But I do think the amount of time to work on an important problem “enough” usually makes people cranky. lots of the most interesting ideas I’ve seen teams come up with happened only well after many people involved would rather have moved on.
I’m not disagreeing with you…
However I do find your first sentence in this response quite ironic in context of your post. I think the whole idea that multiple people can just opinionate in their safe corners of the internet is counter to what you are trying to say about necessary aggrevation.
If I opinionate on my blog. And it annoys you, you are more likely to just tune me out and not continue reading my blog and avoid the necessary aggravation to reach the better solution even if you’ve acknowledged to yourself I’m a stakeholder on a “team” and not just some random troll or driveby commentator.
And on a less snarky note. How do you incentive people to stay in the room or on the list long enough? In corporate managed structures…management holds a stick and beats you with it. But in a peer meritocracy structure, what’s the incentive to push past the easy answer? And post crank inducing session that tends to stress fracture team relationships, how do you dial down the crankiness and rebuild team bonds?
-jef
I think lots of open source projects do have a pretty good mechanism at least for technical problems – you have to get through patch review. and I’ve definitely both provided patch reviews that people thought were way overboard or wrong, and received the same.
I’ve also seen a lot of technical threads that did go pretty deep and fight their way to a much better answer.
my impression is, the kernel community is pretty good about not taking the first iteration of ideas for example … they often say “we can do better, try more” until people are pretty darn frustrated.
I think whether the community is virtual or in-person you need a lot of trust to hash things out passionately without getting personal or holding grudges.
or, not a few open source projects and maintainers are famous for not caring whether people are upset… just like Mr. Jobs I suppose.
thinking a bit, it sounds so obvious, but meeting in person for food and drink has always worked best for me to patch up after a tech fight.
it’s worked well in companies too. suffer through a hardcore day of figuring stuff out, then it’s so much better (with respect to work relationships anyway) to all go out and socialize a bit instead of just going home.
And for more distributed work group who can’t meet face-to-face often enough? If the internet make it easier to have the prolonged aggravations, is there something akin to the afterhour beers that doesn’t involve flying halfway around the world to meet up? Not that I don’t mind flying halfway around the world..you just can’t do it every week realistically. What are some good internet age ideas that can be a surrogate for the pizza and beer until you can all meet once a year os so for that pizza and beer?
yeah, I don’t know. I’ve thought before that if one could solve “hanging around talking about nothing” for distributed teams it’d make a huge difference. I’ve seen some distributed teams that were pretty good about keeping IRC chatter going, early GNOME used to be for example. Miguel was always stirring up the IRC conversation. Campfire worked OK for us at litl some weeks but not others.
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