Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

We hadn’t created it for broadcast. We created it as an internal company document, using it to communicate the culture to new hires and make sure we were perfectly clear about how we wanted them to operate.

It’s a matter of identifying the behaviors that you would like to see become consistent practices and then instilling the discipline of actually doing them.

data can be used as an accountability shield, deflecting responsibility for a judgment call. People are more comfortable making decisions based on hard data in part because they can fall back on that data if the decision turns out to be wrong.

One of the biggest mistakes is fixating on metrics that don’t matter.

data informed rather than data driven.

People can also be biased about which data they marshal. And we’ve all seen that people tend to privilege their own data over that of others.

If people ask in a true spirit of interest about the problems others are wrestling with, remarkable bridges of understanding can be built.

we had cultivated the practice of asking people about the nature of problems they were tackling rather than assuming an understanding of them.

“Can you help me understand what leads you to believe that’s true?”