Aaron Dignan on Changing the Way You Work

Aaron Dignan

Of decision making culture you're going to have, what kind of agreements culture you're going to have. And And there are effectively two options. You can have a permission culture or a constraint culture. So a permission culture is a culture where, you guessed it, you have to ask permission to do anything. So the default assumption is you can't do anything until you're told that you can. So the bathroom pass that you had in school, perfect example of a permission culture, you can't even go to the bathroom without asking. That's how badly we're going to drill that into your head. And so that way you understand that that's how the world works. And there are so many examples of this in the form of instructions and protocols and guidelines and manuals and all that. And permission can come in many forms, it can come in the form of like a promotion, like now you're the head of marketing. So now you get to make choices about what we invest our money in. But that's still a form of permission. It's still me giving you this position that I have deigned to like put you in. And permission cultures tend to have a problem, which is that they then have to define everything. Because to your point earlier about judgment, there's no room for judgment in a permission culture unless you have the permission already. So you get a lot of people sitting on their hands. And these are the sorts of cultures where a leader will walk into the room and the trash hasn't been taken out. And people will say, not my job. It's not my job to take the trash out. It's her job to take the trash out. So I'm not going to do it because I only do what I'm told. So that's one option. The other option is the culture of constraint, which is the absolute inverse. So you can do anything unless we say that you can't. So now our job with our agreements and our policies and our processes and our roles and our team structures is to clarify what the edges are, to actually constrain the system in some way, Shape, or form. So when we create a purpose statement for the organization in a constraint culture, we're actually constraining directionality. We're saying like the vector of this company is towards, we're going to be, you know, we're going to get the world on electric cars. So that I've de-scoped the rest of the stuff that we could do. We're not going to make mops. We're going to make electric cars. I've sort of focused our energy. And a hiring process is a constraint where I say, instead of doing all the possible ways of hiring, we're going to hire this way. A, you know, a policy about harassment, anti-harassment policy is a constraint. It's basically saying, don't do this. So I've eliminated this option from the surface area of all possible options. What's cool about building a constraints-based culture is when you eliminate all those risk surfaces that are what we call not safe to try or like fatal, what's left is all this space, All this space to think. So if I say it's not mops and it's not cars, you get everything else. And so the room for people to innovate and use judgment and use creativity and solving problems is just massively higher. And they get to navigate that. Now, they're not used to that. So for an example, like we have a constraint in our system, that if you spend more than $10,000 on something, you should probably seek advice first. But anything under that, it's like, you know, use your human judgment, we trust you do what's best for the business, right? Spend the money like it was your own. So somebody engaging with that who's coming from a permission culture is like, I need a new computer. What can I spend? And they freak out. And they literally freak out. And they start like trying to talk to other people. And like, I can I get macbook pro can i get the extra ram like what should i do give me permission and the system is like no there's no permission for that you already have permission to do That you only need to seek advice if you're over a limit you just need to use your own judgment and it's this first moment often in many people's careers where they're like holy i'm 100 Trusted and i don't even know how to operate in this judgment space of like, how much should I spend? So they didn't really answer your question yet. But that's the bedrock of the answer to your question is, once we know which of those lanes we're in permission or constraint, then we know how to approach decision making for the next Layer of the cake. And that starts to set up the possibilities. Keep going. You have more to say on this, I can tell. So in the constraints-based system, we need to create constraints. And so if you think about when you create a company, when you founded your business, et cetera, at one point, there's just the founder or founders. So there's a handful of people around the table and there's no constraints effectively. And the first constraint we're going to create is like, what are we here to do? Or what are we trying to do? Right? So you might make a purpose or a mission statement or something like that. It's your first agreement is what it is. And so that idea of making that agreement, now you've put down the first constraint. Is you're going to then operate everyone's making decisions, having conversations, you know, socially coordinating. And then you're going to get to a point where you you run to another unknown thing or a thing that needs to be clarified. And usually that shows up in either debate or confusion. So people will be like, we're arguing about what our engineering standards should be, which which stack should we use? Which tools should we use? That's a debate you might hear. Or you hear confusion like, I don't know what our priorities are this quarter. I don't know what to focus on. I know we're trying to build electric cars, but what should I be focused on right now? So you hear the confusion or the lack of clarity. And so another agreement is called for. And you have to figure out a way to make it. And so what we do is we talk about consent-based decision-making at the earliest days of the business, consent, not consensus. So there are many ways to make a decision. Autocracy, monarchy is kind of one way, which is like the boss says. So the CEO just makes the final call. And that has some pros. It's fast. Often it's innovative, but it has some cons too. It's often biased and it's often wrong. And so it's also a little disheartening for everyone else that just kind of has to fall in line. So there's a challenge there. The consensus view is great because it feels like family vibes. Everybody weighs in, everybody shapes it, everybody touches it, but it's slow. And worst of all, it makes the idea average. So, you know, a camel is a horse designed by committee. I don't know if you ever heard that, but it's like, yeah, the rounded corners of everybody putting their mark on something slowly makes it average. And so when you have a consensus operation, you basically have a bunch of average ideas doing average stuff for average people. That's how you end up with some of those companies that you're just like, man, it must be boring to work there. You know, that's really, really wild. And then the third option is consent. And that's the one that we advocate for, at least to start. And the idea of consent is, is it safe to try? Is it good enough for now safe enough to try that all of us agree? So if you think about your zone of tolerance, you have some put a circle around it, like this is everything you could tolerate. If I was like, let's change the knowledge project. In this direction, you all right, I have a range of things that I could stand.