Truth Telling Makes the Hive Mind Buzz
"The search for truth is more precious than its possession." - Albert Einstein
The collaborative search for truth is not limited to scientists or researchers.
An effective product strategy, one that actually surprises the market and delights customers, is the best kind of truth: little known by others, but executed with conviction by you.
But, rarely can a founder or CEO or even a Product Leader do this on their own.
There are too many perspectives and potential inputs.
And, more importantly, there is the fog of war.
Most of this comes from the Lizard Brains being activated to play out a Game of Thrones scenario where just figuring out what is truly best for the organization is impossible.
The hive mind -- the true collective intelligence of those with the insight and motivation to do the right thing -- just can't work when there's no effective truth telling.
Unless the CEO or the leader is influential enough to actually set the cultural context for this, it's impossible. Too often, the necessity begins at the top, and there are too many confounding forces which make truth telling a capital crime.
For the CEO or founder who wants a multiplication on effort and a reduction in wasted work, the best way is to activate a healthy hive mind amongst the people who have the most potential leverage.
But how does this really work?
The first is to remove the distortions that begin with you.
As I shared in earlier posts, unless you undergo a bit of "ego death" to get out of your own way, most people will act in ways that preserve themselves. The more draconian you are (you may consider this a form of leadership or decisiveness), the tougher it will be.
The person for whom the 360 is most valuable is for you, the CEO.
Everything else begins to trickle downhill from there.
Unfortunately, many companies, if they do have any kind of performance or evaluative process, focus on the "workers." This is the "human resource" perspective where humans are the resources.
But when the focus is cultural, the only real leverage is to start with the CEO/founder.
And unlike many coaches which focus on the CEO's effectiveness or leadership in a self-improvement context (such as performance or work-life balance), a truth telling approach focused almost entirely on the worldview and mannerism on the ability to leverage the rest of the company, from the immediate team down to the newest employee.
Truth telling sits at the center. And not me telling you what "the truth" is.
But working through a heuristic and triangulation of what you have heard, how you think, and asking whether you are actually seeing things the right way.
One mistake is to believe your ability to make "fast decisions" isn't actually making "fast opinions."
These are different.
But some people make snap judgments because they are highly opinionated. They take a snippet of knowledge and, because they lean towards judgment as a form of action, make judgments.
A decision takes input, has a framework, and arrives at a reasoned conviction. Yes, some people are faster at this than others.
But don't make the mistake that a fast opinion (Twitter seems to reward people who have fast opinions) is the same as a fast judgment.
One way to do this, and to help create safety for your team, is to try to adhere to the "leaders are mostly right" principle. Hold yourself accountable and enable others to do the same.
This can be difficult to do when decisions are hard to show attribution; or others are fearful of pointing out what went wrong.
Power asymmetry is the weakest link, and you likely don't want to acknowledge it.
After all, even if heavy is the crown, very few want it questioned, even by a trusted consigliere.