Strong opinions, loosely held

Repeat after me: Strong opinions, loosely held. This is your mantra.

Forming a strong opinion is essential, and it's equally important to keep an open mind and listen to others. It’s a pivotal strategy for growing as an Engineer and pushing forward decisions. Form an argument you can back, but be willing to accept someone else's opinion if it's better, or respectfully disagree and commit.

A fundamental rule before we dive in: Ensure you believe any opinion you take and are not using it to play devil’s advocate - you need to believe it enough to execute it, as you may have the top opinion. Playing devil’s advocate generally causes more resentment and wastes time than productive discussion. It has a place, but it isn't worthwhile 90% of the time.

Credit where credit is due: I learned this from one of my team leads, who liked to repeat it often - and it's helped me a lot. Hopefully, it's helped my team, too, as we all try to follow the practice.

Contents

• Why it’s essential to have an opinion

• Traps to avoid

• Generating an opinion on short notice

Why it's essential to have an opinion

Opinions are easy to come by, and just like assholes - everybody has one! You can form one in minutes. You have no excuse not to have one, and we'll discuss how to generate one later in this post.

The most helpful thing about having an opinion is that they are great for starting discussions. Even inaccurate opinions can do this well - sometimes better.

It's easy to face analysis paralysis when staring down the barrel and figuring out where to start. Enter the opinion, the conversation starter. The fire starter.

One of the quickest ways to form ideas when collaborating is to propose an idea. Just watch how quickly it will get picked apart and improved on. It's the same with opinions; defending an opinion will generate the most momentum. You want a 'defendable' opinion because it provokes thought and discussion and can lead to divergent thinking. As long as you genuinely believe in your opinion, it’s okay not to be 100% sold on it. You need some genuine belief to defend it for this provocation and creativity and see which way the conversation takes your opinion - it’s perfectly fine to defect to somebody else’s side after debating.

It seems borderline human nature for people to want to prove why your opinion is wrong, so give them one they have to work for. You'll end up with a much better decision that has been validated and discussed in detail as to why it's better, with actual data points - and you'll probably have garnered agreement from the team during this discussion.

Opinion essentials

When you want to have a strong opinion on something and back it in a discussion, I think it’s important to hit this checklist:

• Enough believe that if you have to run with the idea, you’re happy to.

• Empirical evidence over anecdotal evidence, if possible.

• Deep enough understanding to carry thoughtful discussion

If you can’t tick these off, maybe you shouldn’t argue about it. You’ll probably just be wasting people’s time.

Traps to avoid

Don't just pick an opinion from the internet. Come to an informed opinion that you understand. If you don't understand the opinion, you can't defend it and thus can't trigger a good discussion - in which case, you're just wasting time and causing aggravation.

For less experienced engineers, it can be daunting to go into a meeting and strongly voice an opinion that goes against your seniors. Have courage. Don’t back down immediately because they’re more ‘senior’ than you. You’ll develop quite a few skills doing this. In a high-trust environment, this is a great way to grow - you’re not just learning from repetition but through understanding, which is fundamental. Listen to their arguments against your opinions carefully; hopefully, you can learn a lot! You may get proven wrong sometimes, but through having the discussions, you’ll get much better insight. Believe in yourself; you may teach them something new, too!

Know when to back down; don't be stubborn. If you've caused some good discussion, you don't need to keep returning to your opinion, especially if you've been proven wrong enough - start rolling with the leading opinion and continue the conversation. Once the discussion has progressed enough, bringing up the opinion restarts the clock and slows additional progress - so just let it go.

If this is an opinion you can't let go of and it determines a decision, consider agreeing to disagree and commit. Everybody on the team needs to be on board with the disagree and commit methodology before using it. Otherwise, it won’t play out well, and people will feel burnt. It can also be worth discussing if some method of veto is in place - For example, is the tech lead allowed to do so to ensure a terrible mistake isn’t made? Be careful with this, as it can easily lead to resentment, but consider putting something in place. Another thing might be that everybody is allowed one veto (ever), so you can ensure it’s only used when truly needed.

Disagree and commit: vote on which way to go when the team is butting heads and at an impasse. Sometimes an agreement just can’t be come to, so if you've said your piece, but the team has decided to go another way, then suck it up and roll with the team. You won't win every battle, but you can win the war as a team - you need some trust. Worst case? You're mistaken, and the team/everybody learns a lesson. Again, consider a veto method to ensure that truly is the worst case.

In low trust, low maturity, or toxic environments, it can be risky to follow the mantra due to the chance of backlash from others. Work with your team to build trust and maturity in discussions, or consider changing jobs/teams instead! Don’t risk it all to follow the practice; pick your timing. Sometimes, it’s not always worth the fight in these environments.

Generating an opinion on short notice

I just said not to pick an opinion from the internet, but maybe you should. Sort of.

If you've got a meeting coming up, and you know the agenda but aren't informed enough to get involved in the discussion, then you have two options:

• Don't go.

• Get an opinion quickly.

Both are good choices. If you don't go, you save some time and avoid wasting others. If you go with an opinion, you can actively contribute and make it worthwhile.

How to

So you've chosen option two - Get an opinion quickly. Ideally, you've got at least 15 minutes. Anything less than that timespan, and you're going to struggle. How do we do it?

Here are my tips:

• Ask your colleagues (all of them) and put something together that is a mash-up of the opinions and that you can get behind and understand.

• Search the vast resource known as the internet. Put together a few higher-trust sources or popular views and use those as your backbone.

• Do some mind-mapping and quickly come to something - Ensure you have facts backing it up, though! Combine this with the tip above to get a strong base opinion.

As I’ve said a few times, make sure you can get behind this opinion - truly. You may end up executing it. It can be hard on short notice, but it’s crucial as otherwise you risk wasting everybody’s (including your) time. Devils advocates are a waste of brainpower.

In Summary

Always have an opinion for the meeting you're heading into, or don't go. It takes little time to form an argument, especially with practice.

You should be willing to carry your opinion high and drive discussion with it, even willing to execute it. However, you'll help everybody if you're ready to back down when defeated (or disagree and commit). Just don’t play devil’s advocate.

There’s a lot of nuance around this subject, so I hope you’ll form your strong opinion on it and maybe not agree with it all! I do think, however, that opinions are what drive forward you and your team, so I encourage everybody to follow the strong opinions loosely held adage and bring that into every meeting. Try it out, and get your team into it, too.