Fair. Thanks for the push.

How we continue to drive a feedback culture

This is one of my favorite phrases that I pretty much only hear at CBH. I think it’s a small telltale of the magical culture we have.

When someone pushes on a plan / feature design / decision / mental model in some organizations, the responses are often:

• “well it’s more complicated than that…”, or

• “sure, but what you’re missing is…”, or

• “we thought of that, but…”

These are all defensive responses, where the writer is trying to a) keep looking smart, and/or b) just deflect and try to get the question asker to go away (even if they’re trying to look like they’re collaborative in the process).

Not at CBH. Here I see folks engage substantively on the actual question raised, assume there’s something to be learned from the comment, and be very willing to look dumb. Because “looking like you already know everything” isn’t the goal - it’s actually an anti-goal. Because, in all intellectual honesty, we don’t know everything.

What many teams don’t want to say is that high talent density is required to upkeep this culture.

When someone pushes on a plan / feature design / decision / mental model, I oftentimes see folks responding with “fair, thanks for the push”. Then they go on to re-think, or expand on some detail and ask for more input. It’s magical.