Information Asymmetries at Work
A short story & guide on how to build bridges through curiosity
It’s incredibly hard to work with someone new to the company, it’s even harder when a decision maker joins the company.
Back in January Maksymillian Majer joined the RLS CTO Coffee and asked about Tech Debt. It quickly became clear this wasn’t a run of the mill tech debt situation so I DM’d him and offered to spend an hour digging into the unique situation.
We spoke two weeks later. He’d been at Nursa for almost five years and helped build the engineering org, but he was having trouble in the latest reorg. Maks had trouble understanding what his VP was trying to accomplish or how to collaboratively bring his years in the company to the table to accomplish it. He was facing an information asymmetry challenge that was driving a lack of meaningful communication. They were stuck in Differing Realities.
After realizing the problem I asked Maks how he’d approached working with his new VP and he explained that he was bringing project proposals to the table, seeking out a green light and then pursuing the projects. This kind of approach is difficult when there is a high information asymmetry between the decider and the proposer; one party is always unable to provide a critical lens.
Until all parties can look at the same information and agree that it says the same thing it’ll be impossible to make the best decisions. To overcome this issue we need to build bridges between the two people’s perception of reality.
Getting Practical
From Maks’ perspective he’d need to stop telling and start asking. I coached him through a couple of ways he could do this:
Vulnerability & Curiosity - “I’m looking at a handful of possible paths forward and realizing that I don’t understand what I should be optimizing for or what information you’ll need to make the necessary tradeoff decisions. Can you help me understand the objectives you’re trying to achieve?”
Curiosity & Support “If I were to bring you three different possible paths for tackling our technical debt, what data would you need for each path so that you could make an informed decision?”
Curiosity & Support “I’d like to help you with KPI X and Y, but I’m uncertain how to help. I’ve been here five years and built the core technology. Can you share a few of the challenges you’re currently facing so I can propose a couple of possible ways I can help?”
The goal behind these questions was to give Maks a way to get the information he needs to find projects that would move the needle the exec team is watching.
During the drafting of this post Maks told me:
I’ve started working from exec goal down to technical implementation instead of taking a guess at technical solution and asking my VP to evaluate whether it’ll suite their goals. This change has been so profound that it was positively remarked upon during my performance review.
I like asking questions, if you’d like help navigating a similar situation, send me an email at luke + substack at luke mercado dot com.