根回し

I really, really liked this post from Matt Hodgkins on nemawashi:

You’ve been living with your idea for weeks, but for everyone else in that room, it’s brand new. You didn’t give them time to process it, to ask “dumb” questions in private, or to feel like their expertise was valued.

By surprising them with your “Big Reveal”, you’ve unintentionally put them on the defensive. Their automatic reaction is resistance, not because the idea is bad, but because they feel ambushed, overwhelmed or because they feel you are “stepping on their toes”.

A group meeting should never be the place to surprise people with a big idea.

I’ve seen a few of my direct reports over the years grow through the process of learning to socialize technical decisions before the actual, formal decision-making process. The ones that learned to do this really well rocketed up their career ladder.

In a startup, the good news is that you’re likely much closer to the Staff+ equivalent engineers in either tenure or experience. And the scope of the problem is likely smaller. It’s a double-edged sword, though, since you’re on the hook for much more of the decision.
Here’s the thing: in a large engineering organization, the Staff+ engineers from whom you need signoff are, by nature:

  1. Highly opnionated.
  2. Very busy.

This is a pretty volatile mixture for someone looking to get any sort of buy-in, let alone to learn about better design practices.

If you’re writing a design document on an island and expecting it to get approval from three different stakeholder teams in a single 30-minute meeting block, you’re setting yourself up for a rough go.

Enter nemawashi:

Nemawashi (根回し) is an informal Japanese business process of laying the foundation for some proposed change or project by talking to the people concerned and gathering support and feedback before a formal announcement

In Japan, high-ranking people expect to be let in on new proposals before an official meeting. If they find out about something for the first time during the meeting, they will feel that they have been ignored, and they may reject it for that reason alone.

If any L3 or L4 engineers looking to get to a more senior level are reading this: treat this as required reading!