Avoid Consensus (Unless You Want Average Results)

If you want to have big ideas, you have to pick an edge. You have to be on one end or the other, you cannot be in the middle. Because the middle is where there's consensus. 

?? I heard that advice years ago from Seth Godin, and it’s stuck with me ever since. 

Consensus happens because everyone wants to be liked. If you have an idea, you’re more likely to average down that idea in order to make everyone like it. That means no one will say anything bad about it – and no one will say anything great about it. They'll just say, “it's good, that's a cool idea.”

But that's not what you want. 

You want to pick an edge because when you have something that's strong, that's polarizing – that means you are striking an emotional chord with them. They care, they're invested emotionally, even though the emotion is negative. That’s what’s going to produce results. 

Companies are notorious for seeking consensus. Especially as they grow and add teams, organizations, committees – there's all this momentum toward consensus inside of companies.

For Jeff Bezos, the answer to consensus was to break problems into many small pieces and make sure that people had only one thing that they were responsible for. That was represented not only in the hierarchy of the product teams and the organizational teams at Amazon, but also in the very nature of AWS and their approach to microservices. They kept breaking that problem down to the smallest unit so that someone could own it top to bottom. 

You'll never get to the point where it's perfect. But you’ve got to stay vigilant, keep fighting, and continue breaking problems down into smaller and smaller pieces.  

I talk more about this in my latest episode of Seeking Wisdom. Tune in and subscribe here.