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Comment by notJim | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the problem with environments like that is that the best fighters win, not the best ideas. The best fighters are usually the people who can project the most confidence, talk the loudest, and who are the most popular.

By contrast, environments that provide psychological safety enable people who may have better ideas, but may not be as brash and overconfident to contribute.

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You have to be careful about those safe environments, as they often simply shift the weapons from loudness and brashness to sweet-sounding talk and subtle negative suggestions. It changes the breed of social warrior who wins from the "Conan the Barbarian" type to the "Mean Girls" type, but that doesn't help good ideas. One example of a dysfunctional strategy that only works in safe environments is the technique of subtly poking at someone's emotions until they say something off-limits or use an unacceptable tone of voice. Toxic individuals are always at work, and changing the rules sometimes does nothing better than changing the ruling toxic personality type.

There are many ways to implement "safe environments". I'm a person who easily speaks up and is pretty assertive but back when I worked in Scrum I really liked the retrospectives where people first silently wrote down their thoughts on post its, then each and everyone went and put them up; explaining what it meant. During this you were not allowed to disagree with but you could ask for clarification. Then you would vote on what seemed most important and go into deeper discussions.

I always felt that those sessions were more productive than just going around the table or people just speaking up.

That's a great point, and one I've seen in action. I haven't seen the particular strategy you describe, but I've seen others. People can absolutely weaponize efforts to create psychological safety. IMO psychological safety is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for being able to disagree about ideas and come to better ones.

I think great leadership is when someone notices that happening and shuts it down.

Goodhart's law applies to psychological safety. It is a good measure of a culture until people starts to actively work towards psychological safety. I feel like most of these tips and tricks people use to improve their social skills are just making it harder to rat out the toxic people, it doesn't actually make people less toxic.

I understand your perspective. Unfortunately, however idealistic, I don't see that being a great benefit in the long term for anyone.

I prefer environments that teach you how to advocate for your ideas. Build you up as a good self-advocate.

Environments that say "Hey everybody! It's Timmy's turn to speak. Pass him the talking stick" are patronizing and disgust me at the onset.

Better to have someone by your side saying, "Timmy, speak up! You have a great idea. Tell everyone"

I think you're actually missing his point, which is not so much a matter of perspective but rather a direct application of Goodheart's Law. When you are trying to incentivize by proxy (e.g. promote good ideas by rewarding vocal and assertive people), you better hope that there is a very tight correlation between the two.

His point is that there isn't much correlation between good ideas and assertive personalities, so if you incentivize the latter you won't necessarily get the former. I'm inclined to agree with that.

> Goodheart's Law

A man of culture!

I think we can call in the Pareto Principle here. After a certain point, assertiveness / aggressiveness becomes zero-sum (or worse). But getting to the point where everyone worth listening to has had a chance to speak gives you a lot of bang for your buck. You can either have an environment which enables this (everyone gets the talking stick) or train everyone to have a baseline of assertiveness skills.

The baseline shouldn't just be "excuse me, I have a question" scenarios though. The baseline has to be sufficient to handle stuff like "I think my boss is screwing up big time".

> I think you're actually missing his point

You are probably right.

I don't have a good argument for getting your good idea recognized by others, if you are not an assertive type, other than learning to fight harder for it be heard, or finding someone to fight hard for you.

There may not be a correlation between good ideas and assertive personalities, but if you aren't at least somewhat assertive, I just won't hear your idea.

It's like playing a song in your basement and wondering why no one is praising your musical talent. Get yourself out in the real world and play in front of people, loudly enough for them to hear you!

Communication and technical implementation are skills that exist on two separate axes. You might find that many of the best implementers are not also the best communicators, and vice versa. It seems to me that the whole software industry is designed around solving this problem. Make the good implementers your engineers. Get the good communicators who can figure out what these engineers are talking about to be your project managers. The unicorns who can communicate and implement should be able to get a gig managing all these people/projects and keeping everyone honest.

This is an idealized version of the system and a million things can go wrong, but it seems like the only way that makes any sense.

"His point is that there isn't much correlation between good ideas and assertive personalities, so if you incentivize the latter you won't necessarily get the former. I'm inclined to agree with that."

Having worked at IBM Austin in the '90s, I'd tend to agree. The management style was very much "the loudest person in the room makes the decision." It did not end well.

"Environments that say "Hey everybody! It's Timmy's turn to speak. Pass him the talking stick" are patronizing and disgust me at the onset."

I actually personally think its useful to say that in order to shut up overly opinionated people without publicly pointing them out and putting them immediately on the defensive. Opinionated people are also incredibly opinionated on their opinions, of course, and it's more efficient to sidestep that altogether.

Pretty incredible exchange you are having with people right now where you are just straight up ignoring valid points or sweeping them aside as idealism...

Think of it as a free lesson in self-advocation if you'd like.

I'm engaging in the conversation by bringing my points to the table. I see it as an idealistic proposal that doesn't match my understanding of reality. It is very plausible that I am wrong - please explain to me how you disagree, I'm happy to listen. Seriously.

Just because someone has an idea doesn't mean I have to immediately agree with it or like it. Feel free to disagree with me on this, as it would prove my point. It's your right after all.

They did explained what you ask for in very simple terms, you just ignored it and reiterated that you are effectively superior.

It is not that you gave contra arguments, you just ignored.

Which is exactly issue with most confident win system.

In my experience, "high-friction environments where people are encouraged to compete and fight to support their ideas, where they feel valued for fighting for themselves, rather than patronized..." are dominated by people who enjoy competing and fighting for their own sake. The value of any ideas presented frequently takes a backseat to who can win the political fight. (This is actually one of the most common, and most frustrating, failure modes of academia and one of the major reasons I'm no longer interested in being in that environment.) Or, the value of the ideas takes a backseat to who benefits most from the one chosen. Or, any of a dozen other reasons irrelevant to the ideas.

You may regard an alternative as "idealistic", and it may be, but the alternative is how many existing environments are supposed to work, if you press those involved hard enough, and is frequently pretty bad at sorting ideas.

>Just because someone has an idea doesn't mean I have to immediately agree with it or like it. Feel free to disagree with me on this, as it would prove my point.

Exactly. I am very happy to be proven wrong, given the arguments against my position are good. A lot of people shy away from criticizing ideas, thinking that a person will take it as a personal attack (gotta admit, I am guilty of this too, if I don't know the person well enough to assume they take criticism well).

When it is the fight for the best idea or solution, I don't care how wrong I am, I care about finding the "truth" aka the best solution given the situation. As long as the criticism is directed towards the idea and not the person, I am just as happy, regardless of whether my idea won or not (as long as the idea that won had better arguments for it).

A group consisting of only quiet people (to put it simply) is susceptible to one brash person to trample over them. I also find them to be sneaky environments.

Further I don’t think a loud environment (again, putting it simply)and psychological safety are mutually exclusive.

One can be loud and assertive without tearing each other down.

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