No-bullshit tenets for faster decision-making

Tenets are mental shortcuts that help an organization make decisions faster. They are a way to bias the decision-making of an organization in a particular direction.

An example tenet might be, “we build our software to scale by ten times our current baseline traffic”. This tenet helps reduce the number of decisions people have to make in the future, and aligns the organization around HOW we do things.

When to use tenets

Tenets are valuable when there is a particular way of thinking you want to encourage. If you see people over and over discussing the same tradeoffs of HOW to do something, you might have a good candidate for a tenet. For example, if you see engineering teams always talking about how much to invest in testing, you could create a tenet to give clarity about it (a no-bullshit version of it might be something like “we value tests so much we’ll push back project deadlines to make sure it happens”.

How to write tenets

A good tenet should have a perfectly valid opposite tenet that would make sense in a different context.

Example #1:

• “We build things in a cost-conscious way, even if it takes longer to build”. Vs.
• “We are willing to throw money at problems if it speeds us up”

Example #2:

• “We value clarity over moving quickly” Vs.
• “We value taking action over analysis”.

It’s often good to have a “We value this, over this” structure to the tenet. But you can also use a structure where you’re explicit instead. For example:

• We build our software to scale by ten times our current baseline traffic. Vs.
• We build our software to scale by twenty times our current baseline traffic.

Both of the variations are valid, so you know it’s a good tenet. It should feel opinionated! One tip: try to think of the things people are actually trading off and use that.

After you have the pithy sentence for a tenet, the next part is the commentary. You should have commentary after the tenet that gives more nuance, and helps people understand WHY we do things this way. Give a little context for why this makes sense for the company, and also outline when we might not follow the tenet. Be opinionated, but show the nuance. You can also give people some rules of thumb they can use to help them decide these things for themselves. For example, if the tenet is “we’re willing to spend money on problems to speed things up”, you might provide guidance that you can assume an engineer’s time is worth a million dollars a year.

Note my examples above are how I do it. Feel free to use your own format — just make sure it is clear and unambiguous.

How to implement tenets

1. Start with your team or organization. Discuss the pattern you see and the idea of using a tenet to help guide decision-making.
2. Write a draft and get feedback.
3. Introduce the tenet idea and the new tenet. Publish it in a company-accessible location.
4. Add tenets to onboarding.

If you’re in a company that encourages individual contributors to contribute these types of things, you can define a way for people to propose tenets. Designate a leader who manages the process.

How to structure tenets

Tenets can be centralized and global. They can also be federated throughout the organization, with each team creating tenets for itself. I usually start with a tenet or two, and see if it develops organically on local teams. If you do federate it, you should train your managers on how to create effective tenets, by doing a workshop or sharing this blog post with them.

How to not screw up tenets

• Don’t make too many tenets. You want people to be able to remember them. Just have a couple. You can retire tenets that don’t seem necessary.
• Don’t make obvious tenets. They should be things that the organization really needs to keep in mind and doesn’t have a habit of thinking that way.

Open questions

• I’ve never tried starting an organization or team with a set of tenets — I’ve always viewed them as emergent. If you have experience with this, I’d love to hear the tradeoffs you found.

Coordination models

Tenets are just one of many coordination models. Coordination models give you a menu of choices to choose from when solving your leadership coordination issues.

Podcast on related topics

Decoding Leadership is my podcast on leadership. I talk about tenets in this episode on removing yourself from being a bottleneck.

Thank you

Shaun Yelle for introducing me to tenets. Seth Falcon for overall feedback, for pointing out the initial version had too many steps to implement tenets and basically rewriting it for me, for the interesting question about emergent tenets versus initializing a team with them, and for some excellent editing suggestions. Matthew Finlayson for feedback on this post and suggesting I go into more detail on how to implement tenets.

Image by chenspec from Pixabay