Rituals of Great Decision-Making | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

Introduction and Inspiration for "Rituals of Great Teams"

• Rituals are a topic of interest, and people have normal hobbies, but collecting people's rituals is a unique one, which is being turned into a book called "Rituals of Great Teams" (32s).
• The inspiration for the book started with a conversation with Bing Gordon, the chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, who mentioned that great companies have a small list of "golden rituals" that pass three tests: they're named, every employee knows them by their first Friday, and they're templated (1m4s).
• Examples of golden rituals include Amazon's six-pagers, Google's OKRs, and Salesforce's V2MOM, and having a great set of golden rituals is essential for a company to be great (1m20s).
• The book "Rituals of Great Teams" is being written in the open, and readers can join the Brain Trust at ritualgreatteams.com to provide feedback and contributions (1m40s).

Rituals as a Reflection of Culture

• A conversation with Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot, revealed an interesting perspective on rituals, including the idea that companies build two products: one for customers and one for employees, which is often described as culture (1m58s).
• Rituals are a two-way mirror of a company's culture, and designing rituals is essential for building a strong culture (2m41s).

Focus on Decision-Making Rituals

• The focus of the talk is on decision-making rituals, specifically how to ask the right question, follow the right decision process, and involve the right stakeholders (3m14s).
• The talk will provide many examples of decision-making rituals, which are meant to be inspirational and can be used as is if they resonate with the audience (3m36s).
• The main point of the discussion is to inspire the audience to design their own rituals, rather than adopting someone else's, and to take control of how their teams run their rituals (3m44s).
• The discussion will include examples from Kota, a company that offers a product for running rituals, but the main point is to implement these ideas in whatever toolkit is being used (3m53s).

Asking the Right Question

• The first topic of discussion is asking the right question, which is illustrated by a story from the speaker's time at YouTube in 2008 (4m13s).
• At YouTube in 2008, the team was facing a dilemma about what to do with search queries for the TV show "Modern Family", which was not available on the platform (4m31s).
• The team was divided on whether to link out to ABC.com, where the show was available for free, or to prioritize uploading great content to YouTube (5m32s).
• The debate persisted, and the team decided to hold an offsite to discuss the issue, during which the speaker was tasked with framing the discussion and gathering data (5m57s).
• The speaker read a paper from the Google shopping team, which found that users preferred Amazon over Google shopping because of the consistent experience it offered (6m17s).
• The speaker decided to reframe the discussion around the question of whether the online video market would value consistency or comprehensiveness in 10 years (6m53s).
• The team concluded that the market would value consistency, and in hindsight, this discussion, which took place 16 years ago, was correct, as the online video market has exploded and prioritized consistency (7m4s).
• The concept of "Igen questions" was developed, which refers to the question that, when answered first, would answer most of the other questions, and is based on the math concept of "Igen vectors" from linear algebra (7m42s).
• Igen questions are the most discriminating questions in a multi-dimensional space, and answering them can resolve many other related questions (7m45s).
• The idea is to identify the right question to ask, rather than just focusing on getting the right answer, and to think about how to get to the right question in the first place (8m45s).

Forming the Right Decision Process

• A conversation with Colin Brer, former Chief of Staff to Jeff Bezos at Amazon, discussed the importance of forming the right decision process, and how Amazon's shift away from PowerPoint presentations in 2004 changed the company's culture (9m2s).
• In 2004, Jeff Bezos sent out a memo banning PowerPoint presentations, and around the same time, a new product called "Rightly" was released, which allowed for co-writing and commenting, and had a significant impact on Amazon's decision-making process (9m20s).
• The use of Google Docs and similar tools for decision-making was discussed, and the limitations of relying on the comments section of a document for important decisions were highlighted (10m28s).
• The conversation led to a discussion about what's wrong with relying on Google Docs for important decisions and how to improve the decision-making process (10m31s).
• In traditional document review processes, comments are often reviewed in the order they were received, which can lead to inefficient discussions and important points being overlooked (11m7s).
• A common issue with traditional comment reviews is that they can be disorganized and may not accurately reflect the importance or relevance of each comment (11m6s).
• Meanwhile, important discussions and questions may be happening in the background, such as in Slack threads, which can be disconnected from the formal review process (11m26s).

The Two-Way Write-Up/Dory Pulse Ritual

• A more effective approach to decision-making is the "Two-Way Write-Up" or "Dory Pulse" ritual, which involves adding comments to a table, voting them up or down, and asking participants to go on the record with their views (12m10s).
• The Dory Pulse ritual includes a "Pulse" section where participants can share their thoughts and opinions without seeing others' responses, to avoid groupthink (12m18s).
• This ritual is reflective of Koda's company culture, which values the idea that great ideas can come from anywhere and encourages open and thoughtful discussion (12m47s).
• The Dory Pulse ritual has been adapted and copied by other companies, with variations tailored to their specific needs and cultures (13m13s).
• Examples of adapted rituals include Zoom's "Root Cause Reasoning" process, which focuses on identifying the underlying causes of problems, and Coinbase's use of a similar template to facilitate effective decision-making (13m36s).

Other Decision-Making Rituals

• Sergey, the former CPO, implemented a decision-making process inspired by Dory Pulse, but with a clear decider, where everyone writes down their opinions, and the decider's opinion is the one that matters (13m55s).
• At YouTube, a problem with planning was that everyone would ask for resources for their project, so they started doing "$100 voting," where everyone allocates $100 across all projects, encouraging people to think about the company's overall goals (14m29s).
• This "$100 voting" ritual helped people switch from a team mindset to a company mindset, changing how they thought about decision-making (14m29s).
• David Singleton at Stripe shared a ritual called "spin the wheel," where they randomly select an outage to discuss during operational reviews, emphasizing the importance of addressing both big and small problems for 99.9% reliability (15m2s).
• Stripe applies the "spin the wheel" idea to various rituals, focusing on both major and minor issues (15m38s).
• Zapier, a distributed team company, developed a ritual called "silent time," where team members write down their thoughts and then read others', but they adapted this ritual to ensure everyone reads and marks others' topics before starting discussions (16m2s).

Matching Decision-Making Processes and Culture

• The key takeaway is to match decision-making processes and culture to achieve specific goals and emphasize certain values, and to find the right rituals that fit the company culture (16m42s).
• Companies like Pixar and Netflix have developed unique rituals for decision-making, such as Pixar's "Brain Trust" and Netflix's "Gladiator meetings," which have contributed to their success (17m4s).

Eliminating Standing Attendees and the Catalyst Method

• A common issue with decision-making meetings is the presence of standing attendees who may not be necessary or may be disruptive, with some meetings having as many as 60 attendees (17m51s).
• A proposed solution is to eliminate standing attendees from decision-making meetings, which may seem impractical but can be achieved through a new approach (18m0s).
• The "Catalyst" method involves blocking a specific time slot on everyone's calendar and allowing individuals to schedule topics for discussion, filling in the stage and required roles (18m37s).
• The Catalyst method uses a doc to outline the roles and stages, similar to DAC or RAPID, but with custom terms, and generates unique calendar invites and Slack notifications for each topic (18m46s).
• This approach has been shown to increase productivity, with the ability to get through 50 decisions per week, compared to the previous 5-6 topics per week (19m51s).
• The Catalyst method also allows for asynchronous decision-making, where individuals can mark a topic as "default async" and receive reminders to fill out their feedback before a certain time (20m5s).

Decision Forums and Models

• A decision forum can be either an obligation or a forcing function, depending on how it is structured, and it's essential to determine whether it accelerates or decelerates the decision-making process (20m25s).
• Different models, such as the Pixar Brain Trust model, the Netflix Gladiator model, or the Coda Catalyst model, can be used to structure decision forums (20m36s).

Identifying Decision Stakeholders

• When deciding who to invite to a decision forum, it's crucial to consider whether the founder needs to be invited to every meeting (20m51s).
• A ritual called "flash tags" was developed by Dares, where feedback is accompanied by a hashtag indicating its severity, such as #FYI, #plea, or #dying on a hill (21m6s).
• The flash tags ritual was initially used to add feedback to templates, but it was often added too late in the process, so a new idea called "proactive flash tags" was developed (21m44s).
• Proactive flash tags involve creating a list of decisions and adding four columns to map to the four flash tags, allowing stakeholders to pre-indicate their level of involvement (22m12s).
• The proactive flash tags system helps to determine who needs to be involved in a decision and at what stage, and it has implications for who should be invited to the Catalyst (22m30s).

Key Steps in the Decision-Making Process

• To encourage stakeholders to engage with the proactive flash tags system, it was made easily accessible by linking it to a central decision tracker and incorporating it into various meetings and one-on-ones (23m3s).
• Effective decision-making requires the right people to be involved, and finding a scalable way to identify the right decision stakeholders is crucial for every decision (23m46s).
• A decision-making process should consist of four key steps: encouraging people to ask the right questions, having a clear process for making decisions, having a scalable way for the decision forum to accelerate progress, and identifying the right decision stakeholders (23m51s).
• The decision-making process should reflect the organization's culture, and having the right people involved is essential for its success (24m2s).

Resources and Community

• The rituals and processes discussed are published in "Codh 2024," which includes links to various rituals and a link to the "Rituals Brain Trust" community (24m19s).
• The "Rituals Brain Trust" community is an invitation-only space where individuals can contribute and share rituals to improve decision-making processes, and others can take and use these rituals to improve their own decision-making (24m32s).