Author: Dimitri Glazkov

I have this intuition that the process is not the most important ingredient in making better decisions. Instead, the key is the mindset with which we’re entering the decisions-making process. 

The process still plays a valuable part, but it only works when we have the right mix of mindsets. Some mindsets are more effective at decision-making than others.

Here’s a sketch of the different types of mindsets that show up in decision making. These aren’t character labels or personas. People can be in different mindsets depending on the context and circumstances. Mindsets can shift over time, and sometimes in the moment.

Note, that I am cleverly avoiding the actual hard problem: answering the “How do we bring people into these mindsets to make good decisions?”. I am tackling the easy part: identifying the mindsets we need to make better decisions.

💸 Opportunistic

The opportunistic stance is the least helpful of the bunch. In the opportunistic mindset, the process of decision-making is a vehicle for advancing my own agenda. I am not here to make decisions. I am here to use this key moment for my benefit. This stance is why politics gets a bad rap. Am I in this process to move it forward, or am I here to subvert it to serve my needs? This stance can seem beneficial in hostile environments, but at that point, there is no actual decision-making going on. It’s all just political theater.

My friends at FLUX have this amazing lens of “kayfabe”, which applies very well to decision-making processes where everyone is in the opportunistic stance – everyone knows this is not about making the decision, yet preserves the appearance and the form of the process. As soon as we detect this kind of state of affairs, ejecting from this environment as soon as possible might just be the best option available. In other words: run. Otherwise, we’ll likely become the chair in this fake-wrestling match.

🎰Opinionless

The opinionless mindset is not that much better. It usually presents itself as deference to the opinion of others. In this stance, I am a carrier of another’s opinion, rather than proprietor of my own. Typically, the opinionless stance is revealed by turns of phrase like “the studies show” or “the <senior leader> said” or “I heard that” when presenting an opinion. When making decisions, this stance is superfluous. If I find myself in this stance, I am much better off excusing myself from participating in any decision-making. Since I don’t hold this opinion, I can’t articulate the value it contains.

The opinionless stance can lead to weird stalemates when trying to make decisions. If “Alice thinks that we should ship Widgets”, and nobody else can figure out why, yet Alice isn’t here to present the opinion, an easy – and more productive – thing to do is to dismiss the opinion. However, if Alice holds power (be that expertise or rank or any other sort), the opinionless participants beholden to this power will stall and derail the process. In the past, I called the opinionless stance “weak opinions, strongly held”. What’s worse, most of the time, it feels awful to be in that stance, stuck between the rock and the hard place of differing opinions.

It’s not to say that opinions of others don’t matter. They do. However, if I myself am not of this opinion, I improve decisions-making by presenting them as the input for the process, rather than part of it. Let others who actually hold opinions examine this information and incorporate it into their reasoning.

If we look around the room when decisions are being made, and see that most are in the opinionless stance, woe to us. This is not a decision-making meeting, but rather an opinion pachinko machine: it’s hard to know where we will land, but it is clear that the decision will be random and will fail to stick. 

Whenever possible, remove (or self-remove) opinionless folks from the process. At the same time, recognize that often, the opinionless stance is forced: it is a defensive crouch that’s assumed by the folks who feel compelled to hide their actual opinion – usually due to some power dynamic. If that’s the case, opportunistic kayfabe is the next stop in our decision-making adventure, and it might be worth investigating what’s causing the defensive crouch.

🧨 Opinionated

Decision-making gets better when we have an opinionated stance. There’s some experience that we’ve accumulated along the way that gives us enough confidence to claim that we understand what needs to be done. We hold an opinion and it is ours. We can defend it, present evidence that this opinion is correct, and evidence that other opinions aren’t.

With an opinionated mindset in the mix, a decision-making process can get contentious and rather heated. In organizations that overvalue being agreeable, opinionated decision-making may feel like a failure of a process. It may look that way, but it is a definite improvement over the previous two stances. Folks in the opinionated stance often over-identify with their opinions, and understandably infuse emotion into the conversation. When managed poorly, these conversations can get unproductive. However, it is also how we know that we might just make good decisions.

In my experience, I’ve seen so many teams confuse the heat of the opinionated minds grappling around a decision with unproductive decision-making. In the seemingly logical move, people with actual opinions get quietly removed from the conversation, and replaced with folks in an opinionless stance. We are then surprised that our decisions are bland and seemingly random. I would much rather endure cranky engineers fighting over the idea and help them manage their emotions than toss coins into the decision pachinko machine.

Spotting opinionated folks is easy: they usually disrupt a conversation with phrases like “well, that is stupid” or “hey, that’s not right”. This may seem counterintuitive, but these are our markers that we have something valuable: actual opinions. Disagreements are good. First, it means that the environment we’ve created is safe enough to voice these disagreements. And second, it signals that we have a foundation for effective decision-making.

In my experience, when put into the same decision-making situation, folks in opinionated stance and folks in opinionless stance tend to have a strong aversion to each other. From the opinionless stance, the opinionated ones look like rabble rousers and troublemakers, the fire to be put out. From the opinionated stance, an opinionless participant is a dead weight. Their lack of opinion is easily smelled and the bozo bit flipped. When the two are mixed in a meeting, get ready for a mostly dysfunctional gathering, with everyone eventually falling back to the opportunist stance.

🏛️ Principled

An upgrade and likely the zenith of decision-making effectiveness is the principled mindset. When I am in this stance, I understand the problem space enough to see that there are many valid approaches to the problem, and many opinions may lead to a possible solution. I also know that none of these will be perfect.

Instead, I focus on what’s important and let that guide my thinking. Principled stance tends to have a slower start compared to the opinionated stance. In the opinionated stance, I already have my opinion, so I just come out swinging trying to get other opinions out of the way. In the principled stance, I first try to understand the principles: what are the attributes of the solution that are important? What are the desired properties we want the solution to have? I see getting these right as the key part of the process, and folks in other stances may get impatient: what is he doing? Why is he so focused on these silly bullet points?

What I am trying to do is map out the tradeoff space. I anticipate that the ideal solution will not be achievable, so I need to know where I can afford to accumulate decision debt: the downsides of the decision we’re about to make. Because ultimately, all decisions – especially the less-reversible ones – will have unpleasant side effects. Principled stance is about accepting that fact.

Principled decision-making stance typically doesn’t carry the same emotional heat as the opinionated one: there is less identity attachment to the opinion. It feels more deliberate, yet the progress toward the decisions is fairly clear and steady. When most folks in the process are in this stance, decisions are made quickly and they tend to stick.

🌱 Space-holding

There is another mindset that I’ve seen people assume during decision-making: the space-holding stance. When entering a decision-making process while in this mindset, I no longer care about the specifics of the decision. I want to make sure we make good decisions consistently.

This stance may seem similar to the opinionless stance, and because of that, opinionated folks often have an allergic reaction to space-holding folks being present. However, when they get a chance to engage, they quickly unflip the bozo bit, impressed by the fact that space-holding folks deeply understand the problem and can see how a particular opinion fits into the overall problem space.

Primarily, space-holding folks cultivate decision-making space. They help everyone stretch toward the principled mindset. They quickly detect and carefully fence off the opportunists. They give opinionless folks tasks of collecting the data and relieve them of the burden of defending others’ opinions. They disarm pitched battles of opinionated folks with curiosity, separating out the value of their opinions from the opinion-holder’s identity. They help principled folks create and improve upon principles.

I am not that great at holding this stance. When I try to adopt this mindset, I notice that I usually fall into the principled stance, lured by the actual problem that’s being solved. I get too caught up in the what and forget to care about the how. 

In some cases, I crouch into the opinionless stance, where I hold my tongue trying to “let people speak,” becoming a barnacle. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see that “creating space” is not a passive task, but rather a sort of jam session to inspire folks to reveal and present their opinions.

While it would be ideal if everyone made decisions with this mindset, my guess is that the space-holding stance is a combination of skill and probably a unique gift that only a few people possess. 

I’ve had the pleasure of working with a few folks who naturally assume this stance.  It’s a marvel to see them do it. Communities of people sprout around them wherever they go. It’s like they can’t help but create places where people can discuss hard problems and come up with insightful solutions to them. If we are blessed with one in our team, hold onto those people. They are much, much more valuable than they appear.

It is only a while after they leave that we discover that our decision-making grinds to a standstill or becomes political kayfabe. We may not even realize what happened. When did everything suddenly get so political? How did that ornery expert get so downright menacing, to the point where they are shunned by the entire team? Why do our decisions feel so random and never seem to stick?

I hope this little taxonomy helps you get closer to understanding how effective decisions are made. It certainly was clarifying for me.

And oh, look. It’s probably not a surprise, but it’s another transposition of the ADT. The mindsets roughly correspond to the Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, and Redefining-ish stages from Bill Torbert’s developmental stage taxonomy. Hey, if it works, it works.

What happens to the teams with wide apertures over time? Does the aperture stay the same? What about the teams with narrow strategy apertures? When I started examining these questions, I recognized a familiar pattern. This pattern seems so pervasive that I will go ahead and boldly proclaim it as a law: the law of tightening aperture. Here it is:

Given a changing environment, the strategy aperture of any organizational unit tends to only tighten over time.

Using super-plain language, the law states that every team’s openness to exploring new opportunities diminishes over time. Every organization that exists today is highly likely to be more strategically flexible than the same organization tomorrow.

💰 The requirement of value

Why does this happen? Strategy aperture appears to be subject to a gravity-like force that can be resisted and sometimes counterbalanced, but never expected to relent: the force of homeostasis. To make it a bit less concrete and easily digestible in the context of this essay, I will rename it to the force of requirement of value.

The requirement of value can be described as a collective expectation that an organization will at some point deliver value. Given how much we put into it, we’d like to receive it back – and get at least a little bit more  (notice how this rhymes with homeostasis). 

There are organizations that don’t have these requirements – but usually, they don’t have strategies, either. In this way, the requirement of value both creates the need for strategy and imposes the law on this strategy. 

The law of tightening aperture applies to any kind of organization, including polities and ecosystems. As long as there’s the requirement of value, the same dynamic will emerge.

The requirement of value doesn’t always come from the need for tangible outcomes (profits, growth, etc.). Team identity can play a big role in the tightening of the aperture. A team that painstakingly discovers who they are and becomes comfortable with that is the team can’t become something altogether different. 

As an illustration, consider Tuckman’s phases of group development model. The “performing” phase is highly sought after and celebrated when reached, yet it is also the one with the narrowest aperture. There is a reason why there’s the “adjourning” or “transforming” stage tacked on at the end: once a team learns how to perform, it must necessarily cease to exist in its current form to do something different. 

Another source of requirement of value might be the collective desire for predictability. This comes up very strongly in the rapidly changing environments. When everything is up in the air, the need for stability can feel existential. This desire may lead to a paradox during the times of change: just when the team needs to keep its aperture wide to better anticipate and see new opportunities, the collective fear of uncertainty will keep tightening the organization’s strategy aperture.

🏛️ Not necessarily a bad thing

Aperture tightening is not always a bad outcome. It might be exactly what we’re looking for. Teams with a narrow aperture are easily pointed at the problems whose shapes are within their aperture. Confidently solving that problem is their unique gift. The key here is to understand and be intentional about the change.

When we seek a tighter aperture, we usually talk about focus. For example, the phrase “more wood behind fewer arrows” heralded such a change for Google back in 2011. Transitioning from a wide aperture to a narrow aperture is often seen as a necessary step to improve a team’s ability to create value efficiently. This is all good. Aperture tightening works out great when the viable niche the organization ended up pointing at is durable in the long term. For instance, it is exceedingly likely that people will want to consume electricity or the Internet for the foreseeable future. No matter how tight it’s aperture, an organization can thrive providing either. 

We just need to remember that – at least according to the law I present in this essay – there will be no easy way to reverse that shift. Becoming more open to contemplating new opportunities is much, much harder once the aperture tightens. If the shape of the industry changes, and the niche shifts, we will suddenly discover that we are unable to adjust, battered by the winds of change and unable to even see them clearly. Like, hey those cassette tapes were cool, but if I built my business on them, I am in for a nasty surprise in the 90s.

⏪ Can the tightening be reversed?

Can the aperture tightening be reversed? Not permanently. As I mentioned earlier, it’s best to view this force as gravity. To keep a soccer ball in the air, I need to exert energy. The default state of the ball is to lay still on the ground. Similarly, the default state of a strategy aperture is to be as narrow as possible. We can resist this force by investing our energy into it, and counteract its effects. But these investments will not have a permanent effect.

Anytime we get an impression that organization has revitalized itself, it is doubtful that this happened to a permanent broadening of the aperture. More likely, a “kick-in-the-pants” event loosened the aperture long enough to spot a new promising similarly-shaped opportunity and allowed re-pointing of the organization toward it. Or perhaps we’re actually observing a wholly different organization, similar in name only – an outcome of (likely painful) transformation. 

As organization’s leaders, when we decide where we want to invest our time, it might be useful to look at where we want to be in relation to our current strategy aperture. Relative to the aperture we have, do we want it tightened or broadened?

If we need a tighter aperture, we must be very careful about embarking on our team-focusing venture: is this a long-term viable niche? If yes, let’s plow ahead. If it is likely to shift (or is shifting already), we are making ourselves more vulnerable to disruption.

If we determine that we need to broaden our strategy aperture, it might be that the entirety of our job will be resisting the law of tightening aperture. This is why leading teams and organizations may feel so challenging and downright futile: we keep trying to walk against gravity. It’s a task that is feasible in the short-term, but not in the long term. Eventually, that soccer ball has to come down.

I often use the analogies of gardens and gardening in my writing. It’s only fitting that I talk about gardeners. This was inspired by something that my friend Alex Komoroske said once – though now he tells me that he can’t remember saying that. Oh well. 

When we talk about gardening, we picture a flourishing environment, where everything is neat and lovely and blossoming in the serene calm. We tend to imagine gardens the opposite of the hustle and bustle, dog-eat-dog kinds of environments.

However, to become these environments, gardens need gardeners. The key property of a garden is not the fertile soil, or a picturesque location, or even the choice of seedlings. The key property of a garden is the gardener — someone who is able and willing to exercise significant power to ensure that the garden is protected from the rest of the environment.

Gardeners skillfully wield all kinds of violent, cutting instruments to ensure that the garden is growing well. They get on their knees and ruthlessly pull out anything that is not supposed to be there. They engage in prolonged battles with pests, who keep finding new and clever ways to get into the garden. Gardeners fight for the garden.

The reason why gardens exist is because they have gardeners: individuals who are willing to put their sweat and tears into them.

When the gardener leaves, the garden dies. It doesn’t die quickly. For a little while, it may even look like the garden is going to be fine. Like all the work that the gardener has put into it has finally paid off and the garden can live on its own. But that is not to be. Eventually, the rabbits dig out the roots. The mites take over the leaves. And the garden withers. Over time, the surrounding environment swallows it, making it part of itself.

Sometimes, a garden gets lucky and gets another gardener. But the new gardeners see the inefficiencies of how the flowerbeds were drawn, and how the soil is too heavy on clay. How the water supply could be moved to a more central location. They have different ideas about the kinds of plants they want and where. With the same gusto as the previous gardener, they mold the garden to their liking. Gardens are shaped like their gardeners, and if they aren’t, they will be.

Here’s to gardeners. Those who are willing to expend their effort and their capital on building a patch of something that’s perhaps quirkier and weirder, but undeniably more intentional than the rest of the environment. I salute you.

Now that I’ve sketched out the concept of strategy aperture, let’s play with it. Let’s imagine two teams: one with a wide strategy aperture and the other with narrow. What are the gifts and curses of these teams?

A team with a wide strategy aperture will have the gift of sensing: it will be able to discern a massive variety of opportunities. The flexibility of the wide aperture gives it the capacity to try everything. Dabble in this, taste test that. Write a quick prototype here, throw together a demo there.

One thing that this team won’t be able to do is doggedly pursue one particular opportunity. When sensing is a gift, commitment is a curse. Teams with a wide strategy aperture usually stink at delivering on the opportunities. They are idea factories. Their curse is that someone else usually takes these ideas to market. PARC, Bell Labs and many other venerable institutions of technology innovation are all subject to that curse.

Let’s look at the other team. Its narrow aperture gives the team the gift of focus. This team knows how to take a vague idea and make it real. As long as this opportunity is within its capabilities, the team will find a way. Unlike the first team, this one won’t get distracted by a new shiny and accidentally forget about what matters. Like a tractor or any other power tool, if we point this team to a problem, we know that they will give it their all.

The curse of this team is that it’s pretty much blind to other opportunities. Once the target is locked, there might as well be no other opportunities – everything is poured into the one that’s chosen. As a member of engineering teams, I’ve seen this pattern repeat quite often. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion. When new disconfirming evidence emerges, the narrow-aperture team just keeps on chugging. Even when everyone knows the effort is going to fail, nobody dares to mess with the gears. People just keep shrugging and saying: “Yep, this one’s going to end poorly.”

This vignette gives us a nice distinction to build upon. If we look around various teams in our organization, can we spot the ones with the narrow aperture? Can we point at the ones with the wide aperture? Knowing their gifts and curses, can we predict what will happen next with the project they are working on?

The concept of embodied strategy continues to captivate me. Recently, I found a more resonant way to talk about the narrowness and breadth of the cone of embodied strategy: the strategy aperture.

As I explored earlier,  organizations tend to have a certain gait, a way of doing and thinking that they develop over time. No matter how much we try to convince them otherwise, they will always veer toward that certain way – hence the term “embodied” strategy, used in contrast to “stated” strategy.

The cone of the embodied strategy is a degree to which the organization is subject to its embodied strategy. Put very simply, the cone of the embodied strategy indicates how much flexibility we have in pursuing various future opportunities. Narrow cones indicate very little flexibility – we are set in our ways, and that’s the way we are. Broad cones indicate a lot of flexibility – the world is our oyster.

Borrowing the term from physics, we can use the word “aperture” to indicate the breadth/narrowness of the cone of embodied strategy. 

More narrow aperture means that as an organization, we are well-suited for producing only a certain class of ideas. Think of a team that’s laser-focused on a particular problem or highly specialized to build a certain kind of product. 

Broader apertures allow organizations to be nimble, more mercurial, able to anticipate and act on a wide variety of opportunities. Some – most – of these will not pan out, and some will hit the motherlode.

Neither broad or narrow strategy aperture is bad or good in itself – however, it must be matched to the environment.

Narrow strategy aperture is very useful in more elephant-like environments, where it’s all about optimizing the fit into the well-known, stable niche. The more narrow our aperture, the more elephant-like environments will be attractive to us.

The flexibility the broader aperture brings is very effective in dandelion’s environments: brand new spaces, where constraints aren’t clearly defined. The broader the aperture, the more comfortable the team is in a dandelion environment.

How do we find out strategy aperture for our organization? My intuition is that we need to look at how this organization is constrained. Put differently, what are the limits that confine the cone of  its embodied strategy?

Applying a framing from the problem understanding framework, we can look for three  limits: time, capacity, and attachment. Note: these limits are nearly always tangled with each other in  mutually reinforcing ways.

The time limit is the easiest to spot and is the most intuitive. Does everything within our organization seem to happen slower than on the outside? The more emphatically we confirm this statement, the more likely our aperture is on the narrower side. Conversely, does it feel like our team moves faster than everyone can blink? Then we probably have a broader strategy aperture.

The limit of capacity is also fairly straightforward. What we don’t know creates a negative space  where we can’t create new ideas. Skills, expertise, and the breadth of experience are key factors in pushing the organization’s capacity limits outward. How specialized are we as a team? Deeper specialization narrows the aperture – and so do team cultures that produce echo chambers and groupthink. 

The third limit is attachment. Words like “risk”, “downside”, and “uncertainty” typically come up to describe this limit’s contributing factors. For example, the more customers we’re serving with our products, the more risk we will be taking to pursue new opportunities – this narrows our embodied strategy aperture. The more existential the idea of change feels within our organization, the less broad our aperture is.

By studying these limits, we should get a pretty good sense of our team’s strategy aperture. Now comes the key question: does it match our environment? If the answer is a confident yes, then we are set to accomplish amazing things. And more than likely, we’re not even asking ourselves these questions, busy doing those things. However, if trying to answer this question sows doubt in our minds, we might be in a mismatched environment: our embodied strategy prevents us from being effective to achieve what we’re aiming for.