Uninformed opinion in a meeting is just plain noise
One feedback that I got more than once from different people in different companies is that I do my homework extensively before meetings. Believe it or not this was not given as a positive feedback! The rest of the feedback is that I give my opinion in very little topics but when I do I have already studied the problem deeply, so I know a lot and I come with a lot of relevant data points that allows me to quickly provide the counter argument to everyone’s opinion. Usually my opinion or suggestion or suggested decision is correct — this is not me talking, this is what I got in the feed backs - but people are not comfortable when their ideas are dismissed so quickly and with arguments that leave no space for maneuvering. Another third similar feedback was that I like data a lot and like to put them in arguments! and again believe it or not it was given as a point of improvement not a positive feedback. A forth similar discussion with a skip manager when I asked to control who goes into a major project discussion or agree about points participants need to read about before coming to the meeting was that “Everyone is entitled to his opinion” which I replied to with “Everyone is entitled to his informed opinion”.
I was talking about this with a friend and he told me that his manager asked him why he reports in stand ups that he had this meeting today while the meeting is only one hour? where did the rest of the hours go? My friend answered that this meeting involves discussing a document that has some suggestions. He spent time reading the document, the other documents it refers to, read books and articles about the topic and build an opinion to take to the meeting. His manager looked at him silently and astonished.
One of the very early lessons that I remember clearly as a young engineer is a lesson from Steve McConnell’s “Software Estimation” book, which recommended to never give of the cuff estimations. Whenever someone asks you how long do you think this will take, never answer him immediately, resist the urge to answer and resist the person’s pressure, take your time to do do your estimation and come back later with your estimation. Later I learned that opinions in general are very expensive and tedious to build. You don’t have an opinion, you build an opinion through reading and thinking. And since opinions are expensive you cannot have an opinion in every and each topic, you have to select topics in which you build an opinion.
This idea clearly contradicts with the amount of meetings people usually have in the software industry, particularly when those people climb high in the management or technical ladder and go to meetings that cover wide range of topics or projects. It is very common in comics to see the industry mocked for too much useless long meetings, and in my opinion it is a self feeding vicious circle where people with little knowledge of the topic go to meetings and naturally cannot reach a decision quickly so they schedule more meetings and in turn the total number of meetings everyone has to attend grows, which in turn leaves little time to do the due diligence before every meeting and so the vicious loop continues.
In Egypt we have a lot of jokes about how a layman is willing to discuss topics they have little to no information about and give confident opinions or even information, but as I reflect on the idea I am surprised at how much sophisticated people with big titles in multi billion dollar multi nationals are willing to go discussing topics they have very little knowledge about and go in circles of fruitless discussions — or worse: come with the clearly wrong decision — with no one willing to say “I don’t know so I am not going to participate or I will go learn about the topic before I come to this meeting”. I don’t know if this is part of modern entitlement culture where people are entitled to have a lot and do so little or this is something that plagues big multinationals corporations only or what exactly.
One of the basic questions in history and sociology is why the western culture dominated the world starting from the renaissance till now? what attributes did this culture have that allowed it to overcome and dominate over other cultures?. And while this is a question that will never have a definitive answer, one of the interesting differences between Europeans and other cultures like Arabs, Turks and Chinese in the era just before the western dominance started was that their maps included question marks where the new world is. They don’t know what is there, while the other cultures were confident in what lies there: edge of the world, daemons, hell, whatever. Only Europeans were able to say “We don’t know”. And the same thing continued when the Americas were discovered, so while the Dutch, English, French and Spanish fought for the new land and went exploring what lies there, the rest of the cultures, some of which had better sea navigation abilities were not interested to join the fight because they were confident in what lies there: nothing useful. Only the Europeans were able to say “We don’t know what possibilities are there in this land or what are its boundaries, lets explore”. It looks like saying “I don’t know so I will learn” does not come naturally.
Software engineering is a knowledge worker industry and hence has special attributes, where managers have position based power and engineers have knowledge based power. The effect of this on different management aspects was discussed extensively, and decision making is one of those aspects . Andrew grove was Intel’s super famous CEO, under whose management — along with Gordan Moore the creator of the famous Moore’s law as chairman- intel moved from making memory to manufacturing processors and became the giant it is now. Grove has a super famous management book called “High output management”, a book that popularized some basic managerial practices today like 1 on 1s. The book had a dedicated chapter for decision making in knowledge based industry. In this chapter, one of the many controls for making decisions was that people at the lowest (in terms of title or position) competent level be involved in the meeting. Competent was defined as not only having knowledge of the topic but also good judgement, which comes with experience. But what I notice is that as an industry, even knowledge is not a requirement in people involved in decision making processes and meetings. Note that we are talking about a book that was first published in 1983, 40 years later and we are far away from the guidelines the famous book has put for decision making in knowledge based industry.
Building an opinion has exhaustive due diligence, And giving an opinion without doing the due diligence is plain noise, and the more we have of this the more noise we have in the meeting. The happy case of this is wasting people’s time, the sad case is that this noise will contribute to making the wrong decision.
