"Disagree and Let’s See"
"Disagree and commit" is disingenuous. This is a better idea.
This feels emotionally honest and an idea I can get behind, as an alternative to the popular “disagree and commit”:
““Disagree and let’s see” allows you to stay aligned with the team without forcing you to pretend you had conviction you didn’t have. It lets you walk into a room with your team and be honest:
“Here’s the path that was chosen. It wasn’t my first pick, but here’s the experiment we’re running, and here’s what we’re trying to learn.””
Committing to something you disagree with is an emotional contortion that is hard to do in practice. But the work of every team is a series of experiments at its heart, and by changing the onus from “let’s commit to this thing we don’t all agree with” to “let’s try it and see what happens”, we move from steamrollering dissent to mutually agreeing on an experimental hypothesis and testing it. You’re learning based on agreed criteria.
That’s much harder to argue with — and at the end, there’s no “I told you so” or winners and losers. There’s just a “here’s what we learned” and an implied set of next steps. Bliss.
It's worth saying that this was the original intention when Jeff Bezos coined the phrase in his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders:
Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.
This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.
The perception among many people is that it's morphed into a kind of corporate authoritarianism. So in some ways, "disagree and let's see" is just a course correction back to its original intent.
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