§ 76
Disagree and Commit
Waiting for everyone to agree is often slower than committing and correcting course if the call turns out wrong.
Keep in mind
Disagree once and fully, then commit, unless it cannot be undone
What to do
State your disagreement once, in full, with your reasons. Then say "I disagree and commit" and execute as if it were your idea. If you are the senior person, do it too: back the team's call instead of making them convince you. For an irreversible decision, or one with a safety or ethical risk, do not commit quietly: escalate.
Why it happens
When a group needs consensus, the decision moves at the speed of its most persistent skeptic, and late in the debate the answer often cannot be known anyway. A dissenter who keeps arguing can also half-execute the choice they lost, which makes the outcome worse whichever option was right. Separating "do you agree" from "will you commit" lets the disagreement be stated fully and the work still go ahead at full effort.
When it stops applying
Groupthink: a culture that prizes commitment teaches people to stop objecting early, and silent compliance hides the dissent that would have caught the error.
Source
Jeff Bezos, 2016 Letter to Shareholders (Amazon.com, Inc., 2017) — "use the phrase 'disagree and commit'", with the Amazon Studios example. The phrase predates Amazon: Karen Southwick, High Noon (1999), records Scott McNealy using it at Sun Microsystems, and Richard Tedlow, Andy Grove's biographer, lists "disagree and then commit" alongside "constructive confrontation" among the parts of Intel culture under Grove ("Andy Grove: A Biographer's Tale", HBS Working Knowledge, 2006). Netflix's culture memo (jobs.netflix.com, current version) uses the same rule, "disagree then commit", in its "informed captain" model, where one named person makes each significant decision after "farming for dissent".
Read the sourceCite this
Hammurabi, § 76, “Disagree and Commit.” https://kanywst.github.io/hammurabi/laws/disagree-and-commit/
BibTeX
@misc{hammurabi-disagree-and-commit,
title = {Disagree and Commit},
author = {{Hammurabi contributors}},
note = {Hammurabi, § 76},
url = {https://kanywst.github.io/hammurabi/laws/disagree-and-commit/}
}Read in a column
- Working as a team
- Deciding what to build Next in the column: McNamara Fallacy
Related laws
- 01Type 1 vs Type 2 DecisionsTeams spend the caution meant for irreversible decisions on ones they could easily undo.
- 05Law of TrivialityDiscussion goes to the parts everyone understands, not the parts that matter.
- 99Believability-Weighted DecisionsWhen a group counts every opinion the same, or defers to rank, the people who have actually done the thing before are outvoted by those who have not.
- 85Context, Not ControlAs an organization grows, rules and approvals tend to scale worse than shared understanding; Netflix's argument is that people given the reasons behind a goal make better local decisions than people given a procedure.
- 108The Last Responsible MomentCommit too early and a guess hardens into the design; wait too long and an option quietly expires, so the decision gets made by default without anyone making it.