[beisner]

> I hate that this is such a common thought process.

In most teams, not everyone is on the same page:

- There are people with varying levels of experience, some may not currently have enough background to fully understand all the aspects that a plan addresses.

- Many/most people have the tendency to let their various biases creep into team-level decision-making. For instance, if someone had a bad experience on a previous team using technology X, they are less likely to support using X today independent of X's suitability for the current situation. And people tend to have a massive bias towards their own ideas rather than others' - so when two competing ideas are presented, one's own ideas are often preferred to others' ideas.

- Especially in larger organizations, there may be political motivations for pursuing one plan over another plan - both for management and for workers. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" and "resume-driven development" and "launches get promo more than landings" are a few examples that come to mind that I've seen.

Unless you're on a golden A-team of contributors who are all incredible and on the same wavelength (this does happen sometimes! if so, cherish it!), you're going to have a mix of people with a mix of motivations+biases+experiences, incapable of reaching consensus around the "true" best plan in a reasonable amount of time.

Making decisions in a reasonable amount of time is CRUCIAL to team performance. Obviously, sometimes you make a bad decision quickly when you might have arrived at a good decision with more deliberation+debate+waiting for consensus. But in my experience, the benefit of avoiding these "bad" decisions from time to time is dramatically outweighed by a team's ability to decide very on things very quickly and commit to a plan (and therefore execute).

Famously, section 5.11 of the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] describes some pretty timeless ways to ruin an organization's productivity - all kinds of behavior that are kind of indistinguishable from the behavior I've seen arise from "disagreeing and not committing" in organizations.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

[delecti]

Agreed. You eventually need to take some course of action, so if you can't get everyone on exactly the same page, someone won't get their way. Those people can either accept that their approach isn't being taken, and thus work towards the approach which has been decided upon, or refuse to cooperate, hurting the team in the process.

The only real weakness with "disagree and commit" is if you have a deeply unreasonable leader, and then "disagree and commit" is the least of your problems.

[mywittyname]

> Famously, section 5.11 of the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] describes some pretty timeless ways to ruin an organization's productivity - all kinds of behavior that are kind of indistinguishable from the behavior I've seen arise from "disagreeing and not committing" in organizations.

Honestly, it seems like "disagree & commit" facilitates these bad behaviors. An "individual's opportunity to make faulty decisions" is a lot easier when that individual has the power to say, "shut up and do what I say" without repercussion.

A lot of these techniques are feigned incompetence. A manager can abuse D&C to facilitate a lot of these activities, for example by requiring a worker to use a tool that needs to be maintained.

And D&C doesn't prevent things like, starting fires around munitions or putting sawdust in fuel. That's a security issue. And C&D can be used to justify bypassing security procedures. For example, a manager telling a guard not to log their entry into a secured building.

[em-bee]

for me disagree and commit only applies to team decisions. a dictatorial team leader or manager is an entirely different problem. in such a case it is up to the team under the leader to figure out how to deal with that.