Collaboration Approach of Elite Organizations

Background

I read a note from Max,CEO of Precence, which about collabration. There were a lot of great points that resonated with me. I wanted to highlight that stood out to me.

Outline：

Who makes the decisions?
How is it done?
How are they communicated?

• What are the prerequisites for making decisions?
  Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled
• Who makes the decisions?
  Informed Captains
• How is it done?
  Context not Control
• Who is responsible for the results？
  Freedom and Responsibility

Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled

As companies grow, they often become highly centralized and inflexible. Symptoms include:

• Senior management is involved in many small decisions
• There are numerous cross-departmental buy-in meetings to socialize tactics
• Pleasing other internal groups takes precedence over pleasing customers
• The organization is highly coordinated and less prone to error, but slow and frustrating
  How to Avoid it？

1. Spend lots of time debating strategy together, and then trust each other to execute on tactics without prior approvals
2. If, later, the activities don’t seem right, we have a candid discussion.
3. We discuss generally how we can do better in the future.

Ultimately, the end goal is to grow the business for bigger impact while increasing flexibility and agility.

Informed Captains

For every significant decision there is a responsible captain of the ship who makes a judgment call after sharing and digesting others’ views.

• We avoid committees making decisions because that would slow us down, and diffuse responsibility and accountability.
• We farm for dissent; dissent is not natural or easy, which is why we make a concerted effort to stimulate it.
• Small decisions may be shared just by email, larger ones will merit a memo, usually in an open shared document.
• We don’t wait for consensus, nor do we drive to rapid, uninformed decision making.
• As the impact becomes clearer, we reflect on the decision, and see if we could do even better in the future.

Context not Control

• We want employees to be great independent decision makers, and to only consult their manager when they are unsure of the right decision.
• Each leader’s role is to teach, to set context, and to be highly informed of what is actually happening.
• The goal of knowing those details is not to change certain small decisions, but to learn how to adjust context so more decisions are made well.
• We tell people not to seek to please their boss. Instead, seek to serve the business.

Freedom and Responsibility

• Our goal is to inspire people more than manage them.
• We believe that people thrive on being trusted, on freedom, and on being able to make a difference. So we foster freedom and empowerment wherever we can.
• We work to have a company of self-disciplined people who discover and fix issues without being told to do so.
• In general, freedom and rapid recovery is better than trying to prevent error.
• Our big threat over time is lack of innovation, so we should be relatively error tolerant.
• The seduction is that error prevention just sounds so good, even if it is often ineffective.