# Wiseman, Multipliers

###### tags: `PIG` `Reading Notes` `Leadership`

## Preface

- The Diminisher boss is like the blackberry, still clinging to life in the dusty halls of corporations and bureaucracies, but on its way out in favour of a superior model.
- Diminishers are not only toxic, but wasteful. Unused intellectual capital is a hidden, but very real cost.
- Strongly hierarchical organizations can foster multipliers, but enable bigger negative impacts from diminishers.
- Most Diminishers do what they do by accident, or with opposite intentions.
- It is difficult but possible to overcome contextual and cultural barriers to multiplier behaviour.
- Collective Intelligence, as a turn of phrase, came up in the PDI team's conversation with Knowledge Management expert Gabi Fitz.

## 1. The Multiplier Effect

### Derek Joins the Navy

- The chapter begins with a military anecdote, wherein a previously high-achieving seaman's boss gets replaced by a D, and everything goes to shit, but then gets replaced again by a M, and everything gets much better.
- The D punishes the seaman for independently tackling a problem with a creative solution, and the M shows trust and delegates accountability. The D makes the seaman worse at his job, and the M makes him better.
- 'Genius' leaders create problems by creating a one-directional flow of intelligence, killing ideas, and creating fear among their staff
- Ms foster genius in their colleagues, by creating a 'viral, collective intelligence'

### The Research

- Wiseman partnered with [Greg McKeown](https://gregmckeown.com/) to analyze the behaviour of 150 leaders in businesses and industries where 'individual and organizational intelligence provide competitive advantage'.
- They expanded their investigation as they distilled their thesis

### George and the Genius

- George was a M at intel. He made space that demanded people thought for themselves, and, according to Vikram, helped Vikram grow 'from an individual contributor to big-time manager'
- Vikram switched teams to one managed by a Genius (D), who always had an answer for everything, had strong opinions, and put his energy into selling his ideas to others and persuading them to execute. This turned out poorly. Vikram estimated that the Genius only got ~ 50% out of him.

### Multipliers Extract and Extend Intelligence

- Multipliers extract more potential from their colleagues. By asking staff to quantify directly, the Wiseman estimates that Ms get roughly twice the capability than Ds. Unclear what 'capability' means in this context.
- In pushing people beyond their own perceived limits, Ms actually grow intelligence, build capability.

### Resource Allocation by Addition

- Ds are too quick to jump to the conclusion that bigger tasks demand more resources, when they could be thinking about how to better leverage the resources available to them.
- Jasper was competing for resources within his company division, and did a bunch of wasteful stuff because he wasn't collaborating.
- The logic of multiplication is essentially the first bullet in this list. Most people are underutilized; the right kind of leadership can extract and expand their potential; and therefore, perceived resourcing problems are often actual leverage problems.
- Salesforce and Apple are given as exemplars, where they both faced an increased demand for productivity, and met that demand by reorganizing their teams.

### Root Concepts

- Ds are elitist, dismissive, see intelligence as a scarce commodity, fundamental and unchangeable about a person. "fixed mindset".
- Ms, on the other hand, have a deeper and richer view of intelligence. see it as a pliable and contextual characteristic. They don't just believe in the possibility of growth, they rely on its reality to effectively plan.

### Five Disciplines

- Ms attract and optimize talent
- Ms create intensity that demands best thinking
- Ms challenge themselves and others
- Ms facilitate meaningful, rigorous debates
- Ms instill ownership and accountability. D = Micromanager, M = Investor

### Surprising Findings

- Ms have a hard edge; they are tough and exacting; they make people feel smart and capable, but not by being nice. No 'cupcakes and kisses'.
- Ms are strategically generous, understand the rewards of building collective strength, like Earvin 'Magic' Johnson
- Ms use humor to create comfort and spark intelligence and energy in others

### The Promise

- Lutz Ziob seems like the most relevant M example
- this is a guide to being a multiplier.

## 2. Talent Magnet

### Stage-setting

- Mitt 'Multiplier' Romney, the talent magnet. Good people want to work for bosses who can get the best out of them, grow their skills.
- M, Multiplier, Magnet, Mitt => virtuous cycle of attraction [Get good people, build their skills, boost their market value, reinforce reputation as a place to grow, repeat]
- D, Diminisher, Empire builder => vicious cycle of decline, which starts with the same "get good people", but then resolves to [Get bad people, drop their market value, reinforce reputation as a **Place to Die**]
- Talent magnets like the Struengmann bros encourage people to stretch themselves by incentivizing proactive, independent, solutions-oriented thinking.

### Dos

- Cast a wide net. Ms recognize that people tend to be bad at evaluating talent, and so often default to the credentialist approach. They capitalize on this market inefficiency to get surprising results out of many people.
- Figure out what people do naturally, and lean into it. Following their 'native genius' unlocks discretionary effort. Label it and make it known to them.
- Give people opportunities to express, build on their natural genius. and you (the M) will find powerful positive revolutions waiting to happen.
- Remove blockers, who impede growth by being prima donnas, egotists, and ensuring that they are 'getting out of the way'.

### Don'ts

- Put people in boxes, make decisions outside the view of the team, divide and conquer
- Take credit for the work of others
- Let losers hang on too long

### How to

- See appendix E for 'Multiplier Experiments' (cooooool?)
- Name the genius in people, reframe from 'is this person smart / good?' to 'how is this person smart / good?'
- Give people jobs that they have to grow into
- Let go of superstars when you can no longer foster their growth
- Accept and encourage moving on to greener pastures

## 3. The Liberator

### Stage-setting

- Starts with powerful Dewey quote: "The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment."
- Michael started out micro-managing in a small consulting company, brutally honest with his opinions, but learned to shift focus to the opinions of others, offering food for thought, rather than prescriptive messages
- Ms liberate people from the inherently diminishing corporate hierarchy, and "free people to think, to speak, and to act, with reason... they give people *permission to think*"
- The liberator sets the tone and builds a generative environment where people learn rapidly, adapt fluidly, collaborate productively, solve complex problems, and broadly crush it.

### Don'ts

- Tyrant vs Liberator, Tense vs Intense, Volatile vs Consistent, Stress vs Focus
- "Tyrants get diminished thinking from others because people only offer the safest of ideas and mediocre work"
- Tyranny can be optimistic, as per this highly relevant quotation "John Hoke, Nike Inc.’s chief of global design, gathered his senior leaders for a week off-site to explore new thinking in design and how leaders can multiply the talent inside their organization, which I helped facilitate. He wasn’t expecting to hear that his optimism as a leader was a problem, but he quickly realized that his hopeful style of leadership might be causing some angst. His team explained the extraordinary pressure they felt to deliver flawless design, every time. With the Olympics around the corner and a brand promise to sustain, the group insisted that there simply was no room to fail."
- Dominate the space by voicing strong opinions, overplaying your own ideas, *trying to maintain control*
- Create anxiety with temperamental and unpredictable behaviour
- Judge people

### Dos

- Have high standards for the opinions of others
- Like Ernest Bachrach, make feedback direct, rapid, and intentionally dosed. Enforce the understanding that mistakes are a natural part of working and learning. Actively and collaboratively reflect on projects.
- Like Spielberg, delegate accountability, not specific tasks or plans
- Like Patrick Kelly, make expectations clear and high, demand excellence, to create comfort and pressure in the environment.
- Make space
+ Create and *Maintain* space for the ideas of others by restraining yourself; don't 'overplay' yourself and your own ideas
+ Listen with intensity, curiosity, knowing that other people's insights are essential to the full picture; Listen most of the time.
+ Make space for innovation by defining work scenarios in which experimentation, risk taking, and learning, are expected, against those where success must be assured.
+ Ignore organizational hierarchy in the ways that you talk and listen. Encourage people to speak up and share their wisdom.
- Demand the best of people, ask them to evaluate their own work according to their own standards. "Is this your best work?", "Are you doing your best?"
+ Don't expect people to produce outcomes beyond their control, keep the focus of incentives and feedback on their best work.
- Generate Rapid Learning Cycles by encouraging and incentivizing risk, failure, learning, and openly acknowledging your own journey. Insist on feedback

### How to

- Say less, give yourself a budget of poker chips worth a specific amount of speaking time
- Label your opinions as hard or soft, scope their implications for the work.
- Talk up your mistakes; get personal; make it safe to share mistakes
- make space for mistakes by being clear with your team when and where they can take risks.

## 4. The Challenger

### Stage Setting

- Matt McCauley crushed as head of Gymboree; he would 'riff and bounce ideas off of people, regardless of... their function'.
- He set an ambitious bar, a "Mission Impossible" in terms of the share price (+45%), and planned to achieve it through inventory and process optimization, which they blew through in short order, leaping from $0.69 (nice) to $3.21 over four years.
- Matt is contrasted with Richard Palmer, a genius chess champ, oxford gad, expert systems engineer, who actually deferred the title of CEO, but maintained de facto control over decisions about budget, pricing, products, compensation, and strategy.
- Richard was feared for his 'gotchas' his 'tests', and 'stalls' he produced in meetings as he googled enough to seem like he understood, and humiliating people when they didn't know as much as he thought they should.
- The D approach favoured by Richard produces an environment in which bright people either leave, or worse 'quit and stay'

### Grade A Beef

Diminishers operate as Know-It-Alls, assuming that their job 
is to know the most and to tell their organization what to do. 
The organization often revolves around what they know, 
with people wasting cycles trying to deduce what the boss 
thinks and how to--at least--look like they are executing accordingly.

Multipliers have a fundamentally different approach. 
Instead of knowing the answer, they play the role of the Challenger. 
They use their smarts to find the right opportunities for their 
organizations and challenge and stretch their organizations to get there. 
They aren’t limited by what they themselves know. 

### Dos

- Ask the bold questions (?)
- Parse the challenge into reasonable (?) increments
- Build confidence by setting progressively higher bars
- Be like Ray, who pivoted an executive team from delivering answers and solutions to posing big questions, seeding strategy throughout the leadership team at Oracle.
- *seed the opportunity* by showing the need, inspiring passion in the shared objective, demonstrating faith, challenging assumptions, reframing problems as possibilities, and seeking knowledge from elsewhere
- *lay down a challenge* that stretches the organization, creating a space between what people know and what they need to know, make it concrete, lay down little challenges to individuals or teams, and ask the tough questions that shape the gap for people. Once you've set the challenge, let others fill in the blanks. Set time frames and permit mistakes. Don't demand comprehension or perfection.
- *generate belief* that the impossible is actually possible.
+ From Sridhar at Bloom Energy: "the direction needs to be improbable, but not impossible. It can't just exist at 30,000 ft. It has to be at the 1,000 foot level... You have to show them a pathway and show them why it can be done. You only need to do this once to create the belief"
+ Create the plan collaboratively
+ Orchestrate an early win

### Don'ts

- Ds *Tell What They Know*, rather than learning what others know, consuming oxygen in meeting rooms and crowding out their staff's thinking.
- Ds *Test What Others Know*, with gotcha questions. "Ds leave people stressed, but unstretched"
- *Tell Other People How to Do Their Jobs*, like Chip Maxwell, who constantly bypassed directors of his movies, telling the staff how to do their jobs, causing the director of photography to resign in the middle of filming.
- *Create Idle Cycles* that force capable folks to await decisions with nothing to do, as opposed to the rapid cycles created by the multiplier. The M creates a climate where the organization can solve problems without waiting for them to catch up.

### How to

- The starting point for the Challenger is Intellectual Curiosity.
- *EXTREME QUESTIONS*: experiment with aggressive restrictions of your opinions; find meetings where you can lead only with questions.
- Create a stretch challenge. Make it concrete. Detail constraints.
- Establish shared experiences of the needs
- Take a big boss baby step that's real, visible, and demonstrates the promise of your vision

### Closing thoughts

From Jimmy Carter:

If you have a task to perform and are vitally interested in it, 
excited and challenged by it, then you will exert maximum energy. 
But in the excitement, the pain of fatigue dissipates, 
and the exuberance of what you hope to achieve overcomes the weariness.

Burnout happens more often when people are disengaged than when they are simply overburdened.

## 5. The Debate Maker

### Stage-setting

- Jonathan Akers needed to figure out an approach to penetrating a new market for his multinational software company
- He set up a task force, beginning the conversation by laying out the challenge, and teeing up the issues, thought it was going great, but it shortly began to "spin with confusion" because the task force's role in the decision-making process was unclear.
- Data was gathered, but there was no debate to actually advance the decision-making process.
- After a series of meetings widely perceived to be fruitless, Jonathan announced the new pricing model via email.
- Jonathan was trying to include people in a collaborative discussion, but still holding on to control, intelligence-scarcity, etc.
- Ds say they have an open-door policy, but spend a lot of time in closed-door meetings, and make high-stakes decisions in private, and then announce them to the organization.
- The M that frames this section is a young dutch police chief who facilitated debates within the force about the best solutions to complex problems that demanded reform.
- Lutz Ziob is highlighted here again, this time as a debate maker, when MSFT had to grow revenue and profit while also expanding the customer base. Instead of making decisions on how to do so himself, he brought the leadership team together off-site, facilitating broad debates, insisting on best thinking, and pushing participants to speak up.
- Wiseman talks about 'prosecuting' debates a number of times in this chunk. Interested in unpacking this model a bit more.

### Dos

- *Frame the issue* at hand by explaining the decision to be made, its context in the narrative arc of the organization, the rationale for making it (together), the people involved in making the decision, and the mechanics of how it will be made. The work of the M is to find the right question, create the right framework, and push participants to get the best out of each other. Give participants the time *and the explicit responsibility* to marshal their thoughts.
- *Spark the debate* by ensuring the question is engaging, participants have the right information available, the conversation is rooted in fact, and people leave the debate more focused on what they learned than what they lost.
- This can only be effective in situations where participants feel safe. Ms create safety for best thinking by reserving their opinions, incentivizing the act of sharing. Within the safe space they've created, they turn up the pressure by asking tough questions, demanding evidence, clarifying disagreements.
- When agreement is reached too soon, the M will push back by articulating the argument against the consensus.
- *Drive a sound decision*, by bringing the conversation back to the objective when it veers out of scope, determining if more work is necessary before a decision gets made, making the final call if necessary, and communicating the decision (the output of the debate) within the conversation itself.

### Don'ts

- Raise issues without framing opportunities to participate in solving them
- Dominate the conversation
- Force the decision, whether it is sound or not

### How to

- As always, ask more questions, offer fewer answers (we seem to have taken this piece of advice to heart, but without the broader decision-oriented framework, it just feels fucked and gaslighty)
- Start by making a debate; asking the hard quesiton, asking for evidence, pressing everyone to share their views, and asking people to switch positions.
- From there, focus your efforts on asking the right quesitons, not having the right answers.

### Grade A Beef

*On the Consequences of Opacity*

Instead of using the brainpower inherent in the task force, 
Jonathan used the task force to answer questions. 
While he thought he was providing much-needed clarity, 
the participants felt they were merely an audience for his own ideas.

At first glance, it appears that Diminishers make efficient decisions. 
However, because their approach only utilizes the intelligence
of a small number of people and ignores the rigor of debate, 
the broader organization is left in the dark, 
not understanding the decision or the assumptions and facts 
upon which it is based. 
Lacking clarity, people turn to debating the soundness of a 
decision—“spinning” it rather than executing it.

*On 'Building Buy-in'*

Too many leaders exhaust themselves trying to garner buy-in across the myriad of stakeholders in their community. Instead of building support, their work often builds resentment as people reluctantly surrender to the inevitable. 

## 6. The Investor

### Stage-setting

- Jae was about to help his team at Mckinsey do the work, but then he restrained himself and they did it.
- Ms may 'jump in' to teach and coach, but then they get back out of the way, returning accountability and ownership
- Ms are investors, not micromanagers
- The M recognizes that their role is that of the sports team coach, that they can't hit ball when it's not being hit well enough.
- Ms define ownership up front and let other people know what is within their charge and what they are expected to build

### Dos

- *Define ownership* by giving people accountability for ambitious goals, establishing your own stake in their achievement.
- *Invest resources* and protect that investment by sharing knowledge and resources the person will need. Diminishers tell you what you need to know, Ms tell you how to learn it. Provide a backup plan, a less fraught source of advice.
- *Hold people accountable* for the commitments you've helped them take on. Respect natural consequences; don't insulate your people from the consequences of their mistakes.

### Don'ts

- *Maintain ownership*, dole out piecemeal tasks, but not real responsibility
- *Jump in and out*, arbitrarily taking over the wheel of the plane
- *Take back accountability* when people ask you to, creating a learned helplessness

### How to

As always, start small and concrete, with an experiment that should produce delightful and addictive results.

- Explicitly delegate ownership of something
- Find lower stakes natural consequences that the team can experience directly
- Let the failure happen
- talk about it
- focus on next time
- When someone brings you a problem to solve, ask them to think of a solution
- When someone asks for your opinion, offer help, but have an exit plan, visualize the point at which you give the pen back, so to speak. Say something like "you're still the boss here, capiche?"

## 7. The Accidental Diminisher

### Stage-setting

- Sometimes good people have bad habits
- Sometimes trying to help too much actually creates a frictive hindrance
- Many popular mangement practices can lead to Diminishment
- The *Idea Guy* (already troubled, personally) is a kind of accidental D whose compelling ideas, tossed about willy nilly, create false goal posts for the team to shoot for, while also consuming the oxygen that others might use to foment their own
- The leader who is *Always On* can overload colleagues with energy and speech, becoming eventually a kind of white noise in the background.
- The *Pacesetter* tries to lead as an exemplar by working harder, better, faster, stronger, but rather than catching up, the team sits back as spectators
- The *Rapid Responder* is quick to respond, troubleshoot, problem-solve with microdecisions, but rather than emulating 'his' behaviour, the team feels apathetic knowing that someone else is 'on it'
- The *Optimist* diminishes by trivializing difficult challenges, not acknowledging downside, risk, or struggle
- The *Protector* tries to create a happy valley in which 'his' team can flourish, but that safe environment can prevent staff from learning from hardship and taking full accountability, where the M exposes their people to toxins and challenges in order to build their resistance.
- The *Strategist* focuses on the big picture, the vision, as a guru on a mountain top, but as the *Rapid Responder* with tactical decisions, removes any pressure to make strategic decisions, as 'she' is already on it.
- The *Perfectionist* demoralizes with red lines and blue tape. Little comments that add up to a situation in which the person reading and reacting to the feedback isn't using their own judgement, but rather trying to satisfy the emergent picture of the P's taste.
- Leading with Intention (this exact phrase conjured itself in my mind as I was reading through the previous chapter), and basically echoes what I was thinking. Leadership is a distinct practice from individual contribution, and demands a distinct skillset. As with any skillset, intention, experimentation, and mindful reflection are essential to improvement.

### The Quiz

- The quiz^[[Are *you* an accidental diminisher?](https://thewisemangroup.com/quiz/take-the-quiz/)] is pretty dorky. It has a question that corresponds to each of the archetypes of the accidental D, essentially asking you "How much are you like this kind of asshole?".
- That said, I think the examples are useful. I am a usually a very *Rapid Responder*; I try to protect my team from the chaos; I might be an *Idea Guy*; I have *Perfectionist* instincts; and definitely take up too much space in meetings with my big ideas.

## 8. Dealing with Ds

### Stage-setting

- Back in the Navy, a middle manager found success by creating space for higher-ups to be multipliers, sharing his own personality, and demonstrating the value of M leadership in areas he could control.
- You can be an M while working for a D.
- Multiplying up is more art than science, but it starts by reacting to the diminishing behaviour with curiosity over judgement.

### Things to keep in mind

- It's not all about you
- Diminishing isn't inevitable
- You can lead your leader, guiding them on how to utilize you at your best

### How to Cope

- Turn down the volume, don't react, pursue your goals and truth
- Build influence away from the D
- Retreat, regroup, withdraw from conflict, use silence and space to allow the D to process
- Earn the D's trust, use it to ask for the space you need to operate effectively
- Focus on the target; when the D is diving into prescriptions, ask them to step back and explain the destination.

### How to Excel

- Use your boss's strengths
- Broadcast your capabilities
- Listen to learn; don't dismiss the criticism that comes from the D. They have found success and have a lot of knowledge to share, though they may not have the tools to teach you.
- Look for common ground, rather than focusing on disagreements
- Admit your mistakes
- Sign up for a stretch by sending signals that you're ready to tackle a challenge one size up from your usual
- Invite them in

### How to Effect Change

- Assume good faith
- Work one issue at a time
- Celebrate progress
- Break the cycle

## 9. Becoming the Multiplier

### How to

- Start by adopting the assumption of the multiplier: People are smart and can figure it out
- Neutralize a weakness, don't set the expectation that it will become a strength. Build your multiplier toolkit incrementally
- Run experiments, reflect on outcomes, establish a new baseline. Discuss the experiments with colleagues before and after to prepare them and leverage their perspectives.
- Perhaps, let a colleague choose an experiment for you.
- Introduce the language, build the culture, name accidentally diminishing behaviours

### The basis of Culture Shift

- Common Language
- Learned Behaviours
- Shared Beliefs
- Heroes and Legends
- Rituals and Norms

# Critiques

- Lotta IQ stuff here.
- Maybe some magical thinking that could obfuscate meaningful resource gaps
- Lotta little taxonomies that aren't especially well connected, at least at the outset.
- Like much of the business literature, repeats info in a cycle of Concept A => Anecdote (A) => Concept A => Anecdote (A).
- Real tension between a) the stated embrace of fluid intelligence and b) the innateness of Talent, 'native genius'
- Do identify and label innate genius, natural disposition, but don't put people in boxes? That seems like a pretty narrow tight rope.
- Henry Kissinger, the Multiplier, really?

# Implications

- Labelling genius and extracting maximum capability while not putting people in boxes
- Tension, fear, and the low-value ideas that they foster: the language around Tyrant vs Liberator seems useful.
- Clarity without prescription. compression with meaning, leadership without management
- Context matters; it may be possible to shift the tone of the Leadership conversation by breaking out of our current format.
- The Diminisher anecdote shared at the beginning of chapter 4 is, I think, illustrative and resonant. Tests, humiliations, and a pervasive need to be the smartest person in the room alienate smart people, and either push them out of the organization, or out of a generative, collaborative, committed mindset.
- The start of the debate maker chapter (5) also hits close to home at Blueprint, where broad discussions about tough decisions have no direction or substance, and an unrelated decision comes down from on high, or no decision gets made.
- The Yin and Yang of Safety and Pressure makes intuitive sense to me.
- The common template of the path forward across these chapters is to start with a safe, intentional test of the approach, build commitment to it as a practice, and eventually internalize it in the culture of the organization.

## Debates

- The concept of a debate is loaded with meaning that could cloud this line of thinking. Let me clear up in advance what I, and Wiseman, mean by debate. The debate referred to in this section is *not* a competition between people using whatever means at their disposal to *appear* as the most correct. The aim of the debate advocated here is not to *win* the conversation, but to bring each participant's best thinking to bear on a challenge or problem that *couldn't* be solved by any individual in the group, to hone, refine, optimize that thinking.
- In this sense, we just plain don't have debates at Blueprint. It's a problem. We don't use conversations to synthesize information, build ideas collaboratively, or sharpen critiques. Instead we use conversations as an end unto themselves, to 'surface thoughts', 'ask (but never answer) questions', and 'guide future thinking (more conversations)'.
- Sometimes (less now than earlier on), a piece of work is presented and some (more or less trivial) aspect of it is clamped in the stocks and pilloried for the duration of the meeting. This has the vague feel of a 'tough', 'important' conversation, but it is not generative, and it feels bad enough that participants will work to avoid it.
- Blueprinters often come into the organization with dispositions that favour using constructive disagreement as part of a collaborative problem solving toolkit, but they are quickly taught to leave it at home by the behaviours modelled and incentivized by leadership.
- At the root of debate, in Wiseman's concept, we find the *decision*. Interrogating our lack of debate at Blueprint begs a deeper analysis of how we approach decisions, and then... whether we really approach them at all. We don't name or decompose decisions; we don't discuss the reasons why we are collaborating; we don't have an articulable process; we mostly just kind of let them happen.

### Incentives to Acquiesce

- Many Blueprinters enter the organization as brilliant, passionate thinkers, confident in their convictions and used to critiquing ideas and having their own ideas critiqued.
- Once they get here, they quickly learn that staff are punished for sharing their opinions frankly and with commitment, and rewarded for meekly offering vacuous niceties.
- Such utterances come in some format along the lines of "should we think about X?", "do we think it makes sense to Y?", "I wonder if it could be a good idea to Z? (upward inflection)". These formless contributions, made without thinking, are encouraged by leadership, who will say "thank you so much, that's a *really good point*, we should *definitely* consider it".
- These utterances are made always with defensive self-interest. They are recognized as 'contributions' to the 'discussion', break the dull tension of a silent meeting, but their speakers cannot be wrong, because they are not saying anything.
- When staff do share their opinions with conviction and strength, or gahfubbid *critiques* of the opinions (vague, suggestive, or otherwise), they get a frustratingly similar template of a response: "that's a *really good point*, we should *definitely* think more about it".
- The uninitiated may note, cleverly, that these two responses are functionally identical, and they are, but the latter foments gossip in the darkness and the silence that the debater is 'difficult to work with', and 'struggles with complexity'.
- Within such conversations, calls for colleagues to drop the vaguary and articulate their positions are experienced by some as traumatic acts of violence.

### Examples

- NPower EvGen Plan
- Resource Allocation
- Pay Transparency

### Roots and Branches

- A history of violence
- Growing pains
- Miscalbrated risk assessment
- Nicety over kindness

## The Power of Remembering

- We don't write shit down
- We forget
- We repeat
- We waste time and demoralize
- Problems whose solutions surpass an event horizon of complexity cannot be thoughtfully constructed
- Such problems therefore only get solved when they absolutely have to be, in a chaotic panic
- The solutions are, as we might expect, not... as good as they could be.

## Reflections on my own practices

- I crowd people out by reacting quickly, speaking with confidence, throwing out lots of ideas.
- I respond directly to requests for guidance, rather than intentionally applying a multiplying practice
- My experiments around leading with questions, encouraging discussions, and reserving my opinion have been working to some extent.