A Letter from Chris Suarez
DID ANYONE ASK FOR MY OPINION?
Does everyone’s opinion matter equally? No. Perhaps better said, not everyone’s opinion matters equally on every topic.
I know, not a popular opinion at the moment, so let me illustrate this with something as simple as a recent family conversation that I inserted myself into where my opinion did not matter.
Last week my thirteen year old daughter was zooming with a friend at the kitchen island. I had just walked into the house from work - music blaring, dog barking, younger daughter running up and down the hallway - all the typical entry activities as I enter through the front door. I overheard my daughter tell her friend that she was getting her hair done the following afternoon and I heard the words “short”, “dye”, and then a series of colors. Well you see where this is going. I immediately inserted myself into the conversation and gave my opinion on long hair, natural color, and style. Let’s be honest. My opinion doesn’t matter, and immediately after offering it, I knew it didn’t.
So why couldn’t I help myself? Why did I feel the need to offer my opinion on a topic and in a conversation that I could contribute no real value?Well the short answer is, we are probably one of the most opinionated generations and tribal societies ever to walk the planet.
Have humans changed? Have we developed a larger or more advanced cerebrum - the portion of the brain that forms opinions? (As an aside, it should surprise no one that the cerebrum is also the largest part of our brain.) It controls our thinking, our emotions, and our speech. That clearly tells the story as to why our opinions are often shared loudly and with emotion. It also leaves some questions as to why opinions are so often shared without thinking.
Our cerebrums have not changed. They have not been redesigned. We are not more opinionated because the portion of our brain that forms these opinions is more developed. But humans have been given more opportunity to voice their opinions. We’ve been given more platforms, larger audiences, new social and auditory mediums to share our opinions.
The longer answer to why we always feel the need to offer our opinion is based on our desire to contribute, to be heard, to build community, and to have meaningful collaboration with other humans. We want to matter. How can we accomplish this and meet these needs in a healthy way - not the “teenage daughter eye-roll in response” way?
Real collaboration is engineering your group, your tribe, your environment with people that think differently than you, bring different perspectives to the conversation than you, act differently than you, and even look different than you. Real collaboration involves a group of people with a clear purpose. Their shared opinions then are based on contributing to the purpose, not purely to the immediate conversation.
Culture isn’t about all thinking the same, behaving the same, and sharing the same opinion. An organization’s culture is defined by how much they care about the group - collectively and individually. It’s about each member feeling safe to share their opinion when they believe it matters and on subjects that matter to them. Culture is about each member of the group knowing they are cared about even if and when they don’t share an opinion on a topic loudly. Culture is each person knowing their value to the group is not based on the number of opinions they share or the decibel at which they share them.
You see, I love to share my opinion, as do many of us. And at times, I catch myself sharing it strongly on topics that don’t really matter to me, and on topics or in conversation where my opinion really doesn’t matter or contribute to others either.
When you create an environment that is safe for people to share their opinion where and when they care about the conversation, the collaboration that results moves an organization towards the right decisions and towards truth. It’s the value of applying an “open source” philosophy to your business environment. When software is open source, it gives anyone the right to use the software, the ability to study all areas of the software, and permission to change and edit that software to make it better for the greater good. The purpose is improvement for the greater good.
When your organization is “open source” it will constantly be moving towards improvement for the entire community.
There is no better case study of this philosophy than Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales founded Nupedia, the predecessor to Wikipedia, in October of 1999. It was an online encyclopaedia where experts would write on a range of topics. The articles would then go through a seven step approval process and be revised by expert editors before publishing. It published just 21 articles in its first year of existence. There was incredible friction in the collaboration process.
Eventually Nupedia became Wikipedia. It was based on a live and open sourced platform that gave everyone the right to submit edits, additions, adjustments , and changes to any article if they felt that their opinion or informed perspective mattered to the topic at hand. This adjustment in process and even culture of the company allowed Wikipedia to publish 200 articles in the first month of existence, and 18,000 articles in the first year.
The speed of growth and scale had everything to do with the increased collaboration and decreased control of the platform. Today Wikipedia offers more than 56 million articles, and perhaps more importantly, it averages about 17 million edits to those articles every month by more than 1.7 billion unique visitors every month - making it one of the top ten most popular websites in the world. Of note, it’s also a not-for-profit site, its founder having a net worth of just $1M. Wales made the decision to stay a non-profit to make sure that content or “opinion” decisions would never be affected or influenced by advertisers or for financial reasons. Wikipedia becomes a phenomenal model for us of a company that has driven incredible quality through increased and valuable collaboration, while preventing a centrally managed structure or an overarching opinion to drive all decisions. True collaboration allows avoidance of groupthink.
So, did anyone ask for my opinion? Truth be told, very rarely does that happen. I more often catch myself sharing it. The lesson? Ensure that you share your opinion when the subject matter lines up with your opinion mattering. Create the space and the safety in your environment and organization to allow for shared opinions. Welcome the loud opinions, the soft opinions, the disruptive opinions, and the supportive opinions. Avoid a drive towards only harmony and conformity. When those around you feel safe to share when it matters, you are on your way to scale, to truth, and to a purpose based business.
Chris
