In any organization or company, there are one-hundred things. Now, at any given moment, ten of those things are very important, thirty of those things are somewhat important, fifty are maybe a little nebulous as to their import. And then the last ten are largely inconsequential for the time being.
You really only need consensus on the top ten. You need functional disagreement and maybe a little friction on the next thirty. You need general knowledge of the fifty in the middle, as they range from good-to-know to I-don’t-know. But it’s okay to have the disagreements on those too. For the last ten, at least one person should be a fucking nutcase about at least one of those bottom ten things. But everybody else can have an indifferent opinion on those bottom ten.
People act like you need consensus on things and you need alignment on things. I don’t think that’s really true. I think you need consensus and alignment on the top ten things, and everything else you need, you know, directional correctness. Seeking consensus is really just avoiding conflict on anything that’s not the top ten items, or about distrust in other people’s rankings. And you kind of need conflict and a lack of consensus in order to have any breadth and depth of thought on those things. The exception is the last ten, which are owned only by one person, or maybe a handful of people, and those people are nuts about those things. And those things are so specific and their owners so few in number that you don’t need to care about that most of the time.
Because at any given moment, all or some of these things could shift. They generally won’t. But the sort of top ten could be displaced by ten of the next thirty or fifty. And when they do, you don’t want those shifted things to come in cold with nobody having thought about them. And you don’t want them to come in hot with everybody having a consensus about them. Because if they suddenly become important, it’s because they’ve changed enough to become important. And if you have consensus on their ranking – i.e. everybody agrees that number forty-eight is number forty-eight, and has a particular solidified corporal form – the consensus will not change quickly enough to address those things, to act on them.
And if one of the bottom ten suddenly rockets up to the top ten, you certainly want someone who’s a nutcase about that one thing because they’re going to be the person in charge of that one thing. They’re the only person who can be in charge of that one new important thing.
All of this is a very long way of saying you can’t dictate the top ten, and you can’t tell people what the rankings are of the remaining ninety are. And you shouldn’t give a shit about disagreements that aren’t the top ten, unless there’s a lack of friction. And the disagreements that ARE about the top ten are more likely to be functional and important than they are to be divisive, so they won’t last long anyways.