TBM 23/53: Privilege & Credibility
I want to share a brief conversation I had this week with a coworker.
We were talking about the best way to pitch a new initiative. I prefer to start with an opportunity, or an agreement to explore an opportunity. She shared that as a woman of color in tech she was often "pushed" to pitch solutions to gain credibility (even if she preferred an opportunity first approach).
I paused. I thought back to all the times I have advocated for teams to start together and delay converging on a solution. At no point did I even consider that some people have to be solution forward. That here I was, a white man, opining about the benefits of starting together, but I wasn't seeing the whole picture. I remembered a couple times I responded negatively to a woman going in guns blazing with her solution ideas. Why didn’t she start with the problem instead? Well…
And that's all I have this week. I have been thinking about it ever since. It was great feedback because I have always seen starting together as being inclusive. When you start together, you get to explore the problem and converge on a solution together. Everyone is invited. Or at least that is how I rationalize it.
But is everyone invited? And is the credibility to work that way evenly distributed?
Addressing that is weighing heavily on my mind this week.
I'd highlight that your oft-repeated 'no silver bullet' applies. "starting together" is a principle which is designed in reaction to a status quo of the opposite. Just as 'agile' was a reaction to its' opposite. It doesn't mean that you should blindly apply that principle to every situation... and by advocating for it, you shouldn't feel like you need to optimise at that level of abstraction for every possible nuanced situational context. But perhaps it's worth presenting your principal with the note that collaborative critical thinking is difficult to standardise.
Now in terms of your mention that it's entirely possible people can often have diverse levels of prior-thinking on the focus of a 'starting together' initiative... just work that into the 'handshaking' at the start of the ritual. As someone who has a few areas of specialised interest, I'd hate to be unable to leverage them because of an overly strict adherence to design-by-committee. Similarly when I've seen colleagues manifest their motivations by 'charging ahead alone', it's often the case that they come back to the group thrilled about what they've discovered and just can't wait to share. It'd be tragic to lose that. Autonomy is very important.
I appreciate your post, and I have made the same kind of mistake as a manager. People's experiences drive what they do, and since we are only familiar with our own experiences sometimes their actions can seem ill-advised. Others know things that we don't.