The Conversation Everyone Avoided Cost the Company Its Best Year

The post-mortem was scheduled for two hours and ran for four.

The year had come in $8.2 million under plan. Not catastrophic. Enough that the board wanted a proper examination rather than a slide.

They worked backwards through the quarters. Q4 had missed because Q3 had missed. Q3 had missed because a product decision in Q1 had taken the roadmap in a direction that did not convert. Q1's decision had been made in a leadership offsite the previous November.

At the offsite, the head of product had presented two options. The room had gone with option A. It had been, by everyone's recollection, a fairly quick decision.

Somewhere in hour three, the head of engineering said, "I thought B was right."

The room stopped.

The VP of marketing said, "So did I."

The CFO said, "I did too, but I assumed I was missing something because nobody else said anything."

Four of the seven people in that offsite had privately preferred option B. The decision had been unanimous.

How a room agrees on something nobody agrees with

The mechanism is well documented and it is faster than people expect.

The head of product presented A second and with more energy, because he had done more work on it. The CEO said "A feels right to me" before opening it up, which he did not experience as closing anything down. Two people then supported A, one of them genuinely.

At that point the cost of raising B had changed. It was no longer offering an alternative. It was disagreeing with the CEO and three colleagues in a room where the decision appeared to be forming.

The CFO's sentence is the one worth sitting with. "I assumed I was missing something because nobody else said anything." That is groupthink operating exactly as described, and every person in that room was individually intelligent, experienced, and well-intentioned.

The silence of others is read as information. Four people each read three silences as evidence that they were wrong.

The specific cost

The $8.2 million is the headline number and it is not the whole cost.

Two engineers who had argued for B internally, and been overruled by their own head of engineering who also privately preferred B, left within nine months. One of them said in an exit conversation that the company "made decisions in a way that did not use the people in the room."

The head of product spent a year defending a decision he had made with less conviction than anyone realised, which affected how he handled the next three decisions.

And the leadership team learned something in that offsite that took two years to unlearn, which is that fast unanimous decisions are what good leadership meetings produce.

The four seconds that would have prevented it

The CEO said "A feels right to me" before opening the discussion.

Had he said nothing, or had he said "I have a view and I am going to hold it until I have heard everyone," the room would have had four people arguing for B and the decision would have gone the other way or at least been properly contested.

That is the whole intervention. A CEO stating a preference before a discussion does not add information to the room. It removes it, and it removes it from the people whose disagreement is most valuable.

Most CEOs do not know they are doing this. They experience it as participating.

Doug Noll's new book Empathy Leadership: The Powerful Skill That Drives Winning Results covers the specific structures that keep disagreement available in a room. Pre-order it on Books-A-Million.

The three rules that came out of the post-mortem

They wrote them on one page and they have held for three years.

The most senior person speaks last on any material decision. Not a suggestion. A rule, enforced by whoever is chairing.

Every material decision requires a named advocate for the alternative. Assigned in advance, prepared, and heard properly. Not devil's advocacy as theatre. The person is expected to make the strongest available case and is assessed on the quality of it.

Any decision that reaches unanimity in under twenty minutes gets deferred a week. This one was contentious and has been the most valuable. Fast unanimity on something material is a signal, and the signal is almost never that the answer was obvious.

What to do with your own last big miss

Go back to the decision that caused it. Find the meeting.

Then ask every person who was in that room, separately and privately, what they actually thought at the time.

Most companies that run this exercise find at least one person who privately disagreed and said nothing. Many find several.

That number is your real finding, and it is more actionable than anything in the strategic analysis.

For related reads, see The Silence Penalty and Honest Leadership.

If you have had a miss and the strategic post-mortem has not explained it, book a no-obligation Zoom call with Doug Noll.

‍