The culture at Netflix had been sending the message to our people that, despite all our talk about candor, differences of opinion were not always welcome. That’s when we added a new element to our culture. We now say that it is disloyal to Netflix when you disagree with an idea and do not express that disagreement. By withholding your opinion, you are implicitly choosing to not help the company.
- Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (Amazon)
In today’s newsletter, I write about the importance of Netflix’s concept of “farming for dissent,” and introduce Dissenters, a key new Condorsay feature (!) intended to drive alignment by enhancing every discussion with a prior understanding of disagreement.
In the best chapter of his very excellent book, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings debriefs on his decision to split the company in two, a move that lost millions of subscribers, tanked the stock price by 75%, and was lampooned on Saturday Night Live. Despite many signs that seem, in retrospect, to be ominous — a price hike, amplifying an increasingly unhealthy DVD business, and a goofy new name (Qwikster), to name a few — Hastings does not waste time focusing on the failures of business strategy. Instead, his primary lesson from the incident was much more fundamental: many key employees quietly predicted the fallout, yet felt uncomfortable voicing their concerns.
After a painful reckoning, Hastings and his team reshaped the company to adopt what they now call the “Netflix Innovation Cycle,” a pressure-tester for new ideas that starts with a process of socialization they call “farming for dissent:”
If you are a Netflix employee with a proposal, you create a shared memo explaining the idea and inviting dozens of colleagues for input. Thy will then leave comments electronically in the margin of your document, which everyone can view. Simply glancing through the comments can give you a feeling for a variety of dissenting and supporting viewpoints….
In some cases, an employee proposing an idea will distribute a shared spreadsheet asking people to rate the idea on a scale from -10 to +10, with their explanation and comments. This is a great way to get clarity on how intense the dissent is and to begin the debate.
Netflix has made an unusually structured practice out of farming for dissent because its previous decision-making and discussion norms failed to protect the company against catastrophe. Amid our well-understood human urges to be liked, not rock the boat, and keep our jobs, organizations who desire to surface the most controversial truths from even the quietest teammates must take special care to elevate them. This insight is what compelled us to build Dissenters, a new feature inside Condorsay that elevates opposing viewpoints to better structure discussions.
Starting today, all decision results will include counts on each item card of respondents who that feel each item is a clear winner (🥇) or a clear loser (☠️). When respondents to new decisions check “show my name on results,” their votes will be displayed in a tooltip on the relevant cards, and highlighted prominently when they disagree with the consensus of the group. Creators of sensitive decisions may also disable name sharing altogether by unchecking the box during decision creation.
Here’s a recent example of the feature in use to power a cofounder discussion around marketing framing, where Andrew disagreed with me and Dan on our consensus pick. This insight quickly prompted a helpful discussion on the difference between tradeoffs, compromise, and consensus, and helped us better align on how to talk about our company to the outside world:
Please let us know if you try this feature, find it to be useful, or have any suggestions to make it better. We hope it helps you align with your teams on the most important things.