"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.
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