Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…For brainstorming especially. And so, what many of our founders don't recognize because they just see like, Hey, I'm just sitting around a table with a group of folks I respect, so we can just debate things as peers. No, you can't. You're a founder. Your voice has a megaphone attached to it even if you can't hear it. So you have to turn down the megaphone if you actually want to learn what your people have to say. So brain writing is I'm going to expose an idea and I want everyone to now write and weigh in on there... it could be in a survey, it could be in a shared doc, what have you, my preferences in through some sort of methodology, you are now sharing your opinions, comments, edits, dreams, in an async way that no one else can see until it's all combined, maybe even ideally without authorship identified. Then when the founders weigh in, you don't know, they're just a part of the mass. Let everyone read the thing. I even like the Amazon, take the first 10 minutes of a meeting, let's just go read so we're all fully present and then have a debate. What it allows for is the dampening of the founder effect in meetings. You're just so full of golden nuggets. That's just like a random tangent that I think could be really transformative for a lot of teams. So the advice here is just when you're trying to ideate and brainstorm, don't go in a big room and put post- its on a wall and talk throughout ideas and have a discussion. Instead, just everyone individually sits and thinks and shares their thoughts and the founder presents, here's a problem, here's a question we're trying to tackle. What it also allows for is an evening of the playing field between fast processors and slow processors, introverts and extroverts, because they're all equally potentially talented in your room, but if you do live brainstorming, you have diminished all the folks that prefer to sit and chew on something first.…

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