Three types of feedback from those with Veto power

Autonomy is hard.

Autonomy without alignment is chaos.

Alignment requires candor (preferably care-deeply;challenge-directly style of radical candor).

Alignment requires continuous calibration (a two-way feedback loop between the team of doers and those accountable for the team of doers).

When you have a title of Manager, Director, VP, or the like… and you aspire to high autonomy, there is a trap you can fall into called Fauxtonomy.

The only antidote to Fauxtonomy that I’m currently aware of is “Feedback3” or “3-back”, whichever you prefer 😂.

Since, clear, challenging feedback is essential to alignment and alignment is essential to autonomy, it stands to reason we need a way to categorize our feedback as those with managerial titles.

My feedback fall into three categories:

No response needed: Weak Opinion, Weakly Held

… treat my opinion like any stakeholder or squadmate

Need response: Strong Opinion, Weakly Held

… what you are doing is safe enough to try, but I do need a response to a question I have about it. You’ll likely hear me say: “Help me get to where you are”. This is the vast majority of my responses.

Veto: Strong Opinion, Strongly Held

… When I believe a course of action is unsafe, I do reserve the right to veto it. However, if I’m doing my job well, this should be the most rare by a couple orders of magnitude.