Comment by mikehollinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikehollinger | Hacker News Reader

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Missing from this (possibly it’s in the author’s book which I’ve not yet read but it’s on my list):

For a certain level of discussion, the outcome might have already been set, and the meeting is a formality to make it so. So as long as the presentation isn’t a total disaster what’s said during the formal discussion is only refinement or finishing details on an already closed decision.

If you’ve ever wondered why in a certain discussion someone “came around” or magically the entire room was in support, either that person or their boss worked it out prior to the meeting. It’s not because the PowerPoint was awesome or the policy proposal is clever.

I do this - when I’m working on something (if there’s time) I “run it by” the people who need to buy in. That helps refine the proposal or pitch, but it also helps do a couple of key things:

1. I can say “I ran this by Stan,” privately to some other folks, and truthfully say he liked it or didn’t and I took his feedback into consideration

2. I can hear what people don’t like and either change it or account for constraints they have

3. It prewires the audience. They’ve seen the material or heard it in brief. Some people are readers. Some are listeners. With this approach I can catch both and address them on their communication style

4. At the discussion I can say “I spoke with most of you here to get feedback from product / design / dev / support / ops etc and I heard... and the toll tax is paid to cross various bridges

Importantly - the execs themselves can just have a conversation the week or day before and say “hey we have this problem. I need you to listen to ____ and get someone from your team to help.” That works because two months later the other party will say “Hey, remember when I helped you with the thing? I need you to help me with ____ because…”

This sort of politics is normal. I’m literally doing it between and across companies on a regular basis. It’s a way to get stuff done, as long as its ethical and doesn’t violate various conduct guidelines and (edit) *its in the org’s best interests.* Most of the time for me at least it’s “can we just get X above the cut line and done by October? I know it’s in November but if it’s in October _____.”

> If you’ve ever wondered why in a certain discussion someone “came around” or magically the entire room was in support, either that person or their boss worked it out prior to the meeting.

This is old-school political practice: when it comes to taking decisions, you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be. Going blind is a defeat in itself.

> Hey, remember when I helped you with the thing? I need you to help me with

Trading favours is an invaluable skill. A lot of people do favours for free and feel petty if they remind others at later date; figuring out a way to do it in a pretty neutral way, will help you a lot. Typically it's just about figuring out that it's not personal. For a great intro to the practice, the character of Rawls in The Wire is a decent model.

I don't know. While I'm not completely against the points the OP is making, something about this statement "you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be," really rubs me wrong.

In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).

Meetings are not the only collaboration point, probably not even the most effective. OP's advice is good advice for increasing communication and building consensus leading up to a meeting, especially if done with an eye towards transparency, as I assume they intend. Ideally you're able to get everyone aligned beforehand and can cancel the meeting. But if someone walks into a meeting blindsided by a predetermined outcome, that's a red flag that you've created an adversarial environment rather than a collaborative one. If a colleague is important enough to be in the meeting then their opinion is an important enough to affect the meeting.

> the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration

A meeting of the executive team is a point of decision, not of collaboration. Individual contributors make meetings for collaborating, middle managers make them mostly for problem discovery, high management make them for decision communication (not decision making).

> middle managers make them mostly for problem discovery

I'd say most middle manager meetings are for salary justification. They want to look busy.

I guess maybe one or two meetings per week may be classified as 'problem discovery'. The rest is just to make them appear busy and visible.

Agreed with the high management and IC points.

Most times I see middle managers meeting (and when I participated when I was one) were about "X is happening, the problem is not (entirely) on my area, let's find where it is so we can fix it".

In my experience, managers have no problem looking busy. They can do that without thinking or conscious effort just by letting the system work the way it wants to. What takes conscious effort is doing anything else.

Yup. Obviously this isn’t black and white - but for the type of presentation / meeting from the blog - the decision is not the presentation. :-)

> In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).

Yes. At the same time, collaboration is limited when you need a lot of one-on-one discussions that are mostly relevant to one person.

You can have those one-on-ones as a part of a larger meeting. But is it optimal? I'd say no. During a meeting attention is limited. You can tackle one problem at the time and can't do them in parallel. If you have multiple problems to discuss where there's one stakeholder, it's a waste of time for others. A meeting that's a collection of queued one-on-ones is not efficient. An efficient meeting is one where every spoken sentence affects every participant.

Bulk of the project progress is done in the trenches, so to speak. Moving it to meetings makes them longer and more frequent. If someone waits for a meeting to drop an unexpected bomb for the whole team, it likely won't be resolved then and there. After all, others weren't aware so they didn't have time to prepare. Asking people to improvise on the spot is not a good idea. I'd argue that giving others as little time to prepare as possible is a symptom of an adversarial environment.

On the other hand, sharing things in advance gives everyone time to digest them.

Perhaps rewording the statement would work. How about "you should go into meetings only if there will be no surprises".

I don't think many would say it's how the world ought to work, but it definitely is how the world does work.

The coordination problem just gets intractable at a certain scale.

Well, it's a choice that we get to make by shaping our own work environments. The more senior we get, the more impact we have to shape the culture of our workplaces. In my experience technical contributors underestimate the amount of leverage they have to impact these kinds of cultural matters. We often think about the power we have to leave, but we don't use that power to change, or we assume that the organization wouldn't value our input without any attempt to validate that assumption. I have found it valuable in my own career to be more vocal about the kind of organization I want to be in, the kind of team dynamics and politics we choose to enable, etc. I wish I had done so sooner.

The intractability of the coordination problem at scale is the reason the original article is valuable. At scale, you do need management that focuses the majority of their time on the overall coordination of the work in order to protect the time of those doing the work. Because of that scale you can't involve everyone in every conversation. So you start needing to have conversations that abstract to a higher level, and which cross levels of leadership. Hence "How to present to executives" But even as a company grows, it can choose to maintain a culture of collaboration and transparency, even if the practices that enable them have to change to adapt to the larger scale.

I think what I'm getting at is this: it's wrong to think that there exists any such thing as "the organization". Like "the government" or "the people", it's a useful shorthand but it doesn't really point to anything specific.

The "trick" (not really a trick, just basic politics as correctly pointed out by other commenters) of cultivating one-to-one relationships stems exactly from that realization. There are all sorts of reasons why people oppose technical solutions, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or the collective well-being of the set of people defined by "the organization".

My ideal of how the world ought to work is a perfect, strict meritocracy. But people play games on me, hence I have to play games on them in self-defense. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma, defecting is at its most powerful when the expectation is that you will cooperate.

There is no honor in naivete. Or rather, you'll be told how honorable you are right before you get stabbed in the back.

I don't even think of it as about meritocracy. I thinking about it as transparency and better decision making vs nepotism and a lot of intrigues.

If you are in higher position, you are the one to decide whether it will be a lot of "closed doors, based on friendship, access and nepotism" or a little of it and transparency.

Going into it with conviction that closed doors are correct default way ensures your company will on high level of it.

>In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time.

Everyone publicly and mutually agreeing to support a decision IS valuable collaboration even if they all had 1-on-1 discussions on that idea before hand. Meetings are pretty horrible venues to actually discuss an idea in depth for many reasons. However if you don't all publicly agree on the same idea then the chance for backstabbing politics increases significantly. In essence it's a trust but verify approach.

In Japan, there is a concept of Nemawashi, which is the building of consensus privately in advance of any public conversations to avoid the appearance of disagreement or uncertainty. Not condoning the practice but there are some settings where you should only ask questions if you are already sure of the answer you will get.

By contrast in California this is explicitly forbidden under the Brown Act. State and local political officials are not allowed to communicate privately with enough members of a legislative body to form a quorum.

> By contrast in California this is explicitly forbidden under the Brown Act. State and local political officials are not allowed to communicate privately with enough members of a legislative body to form a quorum.

Oh wow! "Serial Meetings" are defined. That's pretty remarkable. Also - it's good to know. Thanks.

Yes, it turns out to be pretty broad. Three members out of a five member city council all liking the same Facebook comment in a public group about an upcoming item on the city council agenda is enough to constitute a Brown Act violation.

This sounds wonderful in theory. How often does this get exposed and enforced in real life?

Brown Act violations do get exposed every so often and usually result in the action that was being discussed getting reversed.

Its most commonly violated by city council members because city councils are usually small, so it's very easy to violate accidentally. Say you have a five member city council. Council member A emails council member B to get their thoughts on an upcoming item. Then a few days later council member B emails council member C to ask a question about that item. That's a Brown Act violation.

Does anyone think that law is respected?

> some settings where you should only ask questions if you are already sure of the answer you will get

"In open court" is one of those settings that springs to mind

> ..you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be. Going blind is a defeat in itself.

yep. If you find yourself in a fair fight it's time to re-think your strategy.

> the character of Rawls in The Wire is a decent model

But everyone hates that guy... I think Vito Corleone is a better example of a person who understands the nature of trading favors.

I had this idea that now with all them blockchains, eventually favors will be tracked and traded like any commodity using a blockchain.

in essence, this is just tracking all that is exchanged using technologies.

on one hand, a lot of corruption happens over personal favors between powerful individuals. which makes me think this kind of thing will never take off.

this is part of a larger half-baked idea I had about anybody anywhere being able to 'emit credit'. doing a favor being a way to cash in on their emited credit.. or something like that.

Favors not being 'visible' or 'tracked' is the _whole point_

If everyone knew who owned favors to whom, they would be able to maneuver around.

Love the Wire : Rawls I think is a great character because he twists the premise. There’s a corollary (I edited my post to make it explicit): all actions should be in the organizations interest. He doesn’t subscribe to that.

I'd argue that Rawls more than anyone understands the true purpose of his unit and later the BPD. Ultimately, the BPD works for the mayor and its job is to make the mayor look good. You can see that in how he handles the bodies in the vacants or Hamsterdam. Same thing when he was in homicide. He fights to keep murders off the city's books and clear the ones he can't avoid.

Anyways, great show with IMHO some great lessons about dysfunctional organizations.

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