The facilitator’s first task is to explain that the guide is a liberating structure that will help them explore topics that don’t naturally come up in casual conversation. While it can be hard for people to disclose personal feelings, this step is key to surfacing points of contention within the team. The idea of a liberating structure in an

The Bonfire Moment is designed to teach teams that their day-to-day dynamic is a wicked learning environment, with no simple formulas. Therefore, teams can’t assume that their own experiences offer universal lessons. Instead, they should approach people problems with curiosity and the assumption that they don’t already know the answer. Meanwhile,

some, like Kevin Aluwi, eventually achieve an equilibrium of confident humility, with a more realistic grasp of their strengths and weaknesses, and an appropriate confidence in their ability to handle challenges, but not the kind of confidence they had at the beginning of the journey. The data shows that the strongest startup leaders display this

The Myth of Conflict-Free Growth Another hallmark of maverick management is the attempt to suppress conflicts in pursuit of an idealized vision of perfect harmony. We just saw that suppressing structural conflicts can be extremely damaging. But even the more destructive kinds of personal conflicts are inevitable as any startup grows.

People often conflate hierarchy with bureaucracy—for good reason, because they tend to expand in tandem. All other things being equal, a company with fifty people with a layer of managers will have more meetings, documentation, and approval processes than a company of five. Nevertheless, it’s possible to reap the positive aspects of hierarchy to

Puranam put it well: “Hierarchy has its discontents, as it seems to violate basic human preferences for egalitarianism, autonomy and task variety. . . . For this reason, non-hierarchical forms of organization may sometimes enjoy a popularity that exceeds their direct economic significance.”15 Hierarchy doesn’t have to devolve into bureaucracy.

The problem is that humans are a lot more unpredictable and nuanced than code, and there are universal challenges to working in groups that defy quick fixes. As frustrating as many traditional business processes can be, keep in mind that they’ve endured, at least to some extent, because they make it possible to build large, successful

The Problem Synergy—the expectation that every team should be greater than the sum of its members—tends to be very hard to achieve, in large part because of the trap of the inner circle. Many teams find their cultures dominated by an inner circle that forms around the founders or other strongly opinionated, charismatic leaders within the

During “Class 2” disagreements, in contrast, people take the time to fully understand each other’s point of view, to the standard that “I can explain your point of view to your satisfaction.” By doing a deep dive into someone else’s position, finding the strongest aspects of it, explaining it back to them, and only then formulating a rebuttal, you