Every Suggestion in Your Meeting Is Momentum or Risk Aversion.
Once you can hear which of the two a suggestion is coming from, meetings stop being a fog of opinions and become a legible set of trade-offs. Two real examples — one that cut weeks of friction, one that added it — and where I sit on the aisle.
Transcript
Are you leading and making decisions in your meetings from suggestions that are momentum-driven suggestions, or fear and risk-aversion suggestions? We need both leaders and we need both team members who make these suggestions — but for different cultures, and different times, and different projects.
In a meeting, for momentum-driven decisions, you'll hear things like, you know, friction-reduction suggestions. And those things keep momentum, they speed up momentum. And for risk aversion, you'll almost always even hear the words: hey, this is a potential risk, or we want to cover ourselves in case these things happen. And that may be appropriate as well, in certain times. But it's good to notice these.
Practical use cases that have happened to me recently — one of them was suggested by a team member, that instead of us releasing our agile delivery every two to three weeks, we do smaller drops for a particular project, so that way we can identify problems early. And that ended up being a huge friction reducer and saving us a ton of time.
Another call, I heard from a different person, that we wanted to concern ourselves with a software integration that we weren't sure we were going to need, or we weren't certain that it would be a problem, but just to cover ourselves and make sure that we have that covered. And for that, that definitely increased friction, increases a lot more effort, and potentially the value wasn't there for this particular project, of course.
So you can actually hear those in meetings, and you have to decide whether or not it's the right decision to make for that meeting. Personally, I have an aversion to risk-based decisions. Generally, I'm sitting on that side of the aisle that we're trying to drive momentum, reduce complexity. But in the right circumstances, it makes a huge difference in protecting the organization.
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