One Human At A Time
Kai Brach | The Zola Technique | Factoids | Elsewhere
Amidst our dreams of unlimited scale and frictionless efficiency, the most meaningful connections still happen one human at a time.
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Brach authors one of my favorite newsletters, Dense Discovery, and in this quote was focused on tech’s challenges, but this line gets at a deeper truth. And it’s a difficult truth for me to grapple with, as the author of a newsletter. However, Brach has built a community side of his newsletter, something I will be kicking off in 2025, in an attempt to build more ‘meaningful connections’.
Substack’s affordances for community are limited, so I will be trying something different than the notes, comments, and chats: a Work Futures community on Mighty Networks. One feature will be `unoffice hours`, with a variety of options for more direct interaction with readers, some exclusively for paid subscribers, but most will be for all subscribers. 1-to-1s, group discussions, Q&A, booklets, and who knows what else… maybe courses.
Rolling out in January 2025. I am making it a priority for the new year, and I hope you will help me. Expect an invitation to follow.
And I’m planning for some real world meetups, too.
On Decision-Making, continued
[An excerpt from a ‘booklet’ I am working on, On Decision-Making. A booklet is to a book as a novella is to a novel. Some of these materials were originally published on the Sunsama blog. This was originally published, however, on Work Futures a few years ago, and slightly updated.]
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The Zola Technique
Christine Lagorio Chafkin profiles the decision-making technique at Zola, a New York City based wedding-planning and bridal registry company, a company with a large executive team.
The company’s executive team organically developed a quite unique strategic decision-making approach, which they call ‘taking a vote’. The name is misleading since it is not intended to be a democratic, one-person-one-vote model. Let’s call it the Zola Technique to avoid that confusion.
Chafkin spoke with Rachel Jarrett, the president and chief operating officer:
"We want to make sure we are looking at something from all angles, and to make sure that no one person dominates the discussion," says Rachel Jarrett, Zola's president and chief operating officer. "We have many introverts on our leadership team. I'm not one, and it's something that I have to be cognizant of.
Jarrett began executive-team polling casually, five years ago, after a leadership retreat saw particular success in collecting a diversity of opinions using an anonymous Post-it note system. Since, she's been working to give floor time to the voices that aren't necessarily the loudest--and has evolved her voting process into this three-step one. The combination of debate and polling yields surprising results.
"Nine times out of 10, we see a drastic movement in the vote, and about 80 percent coalesce around the vote," Jarrett says. "Usually, it's because a compelling argument is surfaced."
The process itself is nameless, though is casually known as "taking a vote."
The principle of taking a quick straw poll on some pending decision at the start of discussing it often short circuits longer involvement. But when there is wide divergence of viewpoints, you need a way to get out of the maze.
That's not to say the process is democratic. Instead, as a system it informs the decision-making process, helps consensus surface, and keeps the team more glued together in supporting decisions--even when individuals or entire teams might not agree with them.
This is not consensus, it works more like consent-based decision-making. (See Who Makes the Decision.)
Here's how it [the Zola Technique] works. When faced with an important decision, any department head could propose a vote for during the roughly weekly department-head meeting. That executive would then present their conundrum or decision to the group of 12 to 20 other vice presidents and department heads.
Next, everyone at the table is presented between two and four options--and votes. Sometimes, it's anonymous, a process formerly done on Post-its or paper; this year it's simply executed through Zoom's polling function. Next, a vigorous debate exploring the rationales behind individuals' votes--and this step is key. Finger-pointing and politics are banned. Specific time is spent exploring outlying opinions--and making sure everyone with a non-majority opinion has uninterrupted time to speak.
This is a good way to counter shared information bias, where too much weight is given to information that is understood in common among the majority. Non-majority perspectives should be listened to closely: this is the wellspring of insight arising from diversity.
Finally: another vote. The decision-maker isn't required to take the final majority's recommendation. Again, it's not a democracy.
"This is about giving the decision-maker the information to make a better decision--and to know we've taken the time to understand every perspective," says Maya Simon, the senior vice president and general manager of Zola's vendor-marketplace."It means that we all walk out of that room holding hands on the decision."
Zola Technique is a well-structured process leading to consent-based decision-making. I wonder if any readers are using this or something like it.
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Factoids
Microplastics
Researchers in South China recently found tyre-derived chemicals in most human urine samples. Particles from tyres are a significant but often-overlooked contributor to microplastic pollution, accounting for 28% of microplastics entering the environment globally.
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Neanderthals live among us.
Scientists can reconstruct about 40% of the Neanderthal genome from looking at Neanderthal DNA in modern humans.
About 1-3% of the average non-African human’s genes are derived from Neanderthals. But not the same ones as everyone else.
For a detailed examination of the rise and fall of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, see Razib Khan’s All together now: did human joiners outcompete rugged Neanderthal individualists?:
The cultural innovation engine inexorably folds in larger waves of humanity with every revolution. And perhaps the undertow that swept away the Neanderthals was just a foretaste of the powerful cultural riptides massing silently under the placid waters in which we collectively live out our lifespans today.
A poetic geneticist.
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Introverts
Introverts form 'a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population'.
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The First Right as workers should be the right to a job.
The tech industry laid off more than 264,000 employees last year, 100,000 more than the year before, according to Layoffs.fyi, which serves as a reminder that tech workers may have lost their greatest perk of all: job security.
| Nico Grant in an article about the decline in Big Tech's 'perks culture'.
It reminds me of Hannah Arendt's ‘First Right’: the right to have rights. In a climate of ruthless job cuts, perks as a 'right' are cut to the bone, and people hope they can hang onto their jobs. Do we have a ‘First Right’ at work, the right to a job? Not yet.
Elsewhere
I have found myself returning to this 2021 piece when preparing for important meetings.
In Why the first five minutes of a meeting shape its outcome, Elizabeth Doty reminds us that meetings are about real work, not just status reporting:
In most cases, lack of engagement stems from the mistaken assumption that meetings are time sinks. But leaders who routinely host dynamic, high-engagement meetings set up conversations as opportunities for real work — regardless of the specific purpose. They approach and design them with this premise (and cancel them if there is no real work to be done). And, with this simple shift, they tap into one of the biggest day-to-day sources of team motivation: a sense of progress toward a worthwhile goal.
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The best meetings are a group improvisation, a chance for co-creation. Much of the expertise and talent needed to do the “work” of the meeting is already in the heads of the participants. But, just like improvisers on stage, they need to warm up to get in the creative spirit. Neuroscience tells us that to do this well, people must feel welcome and connect with one another. Although the details will vary with your purpose and your organization’s culture, as a general rule, the sooner people speak, the more engaged they will be throughout the meeting. “Even just five minutes speaking freely in gallery view on virtual calls — before you start sharing any slides — can change the entire dynamic of a meeting,” [Dick] Axelrod told me.
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“Too often, meetings get disconnected,” observed Axelrod. “We don’t think about how a conversation fits with our larger mission, our goals, or other groups’ work.” Thus, even if you have stated your purpose explicitly, it may not make sense to participants. And, especially in virtual settings, it is easy to get lost in abstract concepts.
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It’s the facilitator’s job to bring the purpose to life, to activate people’s interest in the challenge or task at hand.
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Once you have stated the purpose, spend a few minutes discussing it, so that participants develop an understanding of why they are there and what you hope to accomplish. Your goal here is just to spark the group’s interest; if people start diving into detailed problem-solving, you may need to gently intervene to keep things on track.
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It is now time to outline the work the group needs to do during the session. You will want to get to this relatively quickly, because people will worry about whether they are properly prepared and what you will be asking them to do during the meeting. Both issues can be solved by walking through the agenda, being clear about when you will use any prework and how you would prefer people to contribute. Then pause for questions or concerns, and adjust the agenda as needed.
So, five minutes warm up/improv and five minutes direction clarification. And remember the great takeaway from Dick Axelrod:
The easiest time to fall out of a canoe is when people are entering or exiting the boat.
So the right start is critical.