Anonymity is an ally to open discussions
Summary
To invite diverse views in an open discussion, psychological safety is essential. Anonymity can help create that safety.
Be aware of bias cascades and bias snowballs. Influential people and the order of conversation can impact how openly people contribute to a discussion.
Instead delay intuition and collect anonymous input before launching into open discussion.
In retrospectives, collect inputs asynchronously and anonymously before deciding on improvements for the next cycle.
Use idea papers, silent meetings, and anonymous brainstorming before you start discussions about design or to critique and brainstorm ideas.
When communicating as a leader, collect inputs independently before stating your opinion. If you must communicate proactively, be open to anonymous feedback.
Nearly everyone values an open environment where you feel safe to make a civil argument. You want to be able to express dissent or disagreement and be friendly colleagues right after. I know many leaders aspire to create such a work environment. The trap, however, is in believing that you’re always there. There are many reasons someone may not want to share their perspectives openly. They prefer anonymity.
This desire for anonymity is a tricky problem for leaders and managers. Where’s the balance between anonymous input and open conversation? That’s what I want to explain in this blog post.
Bias cascades and bias snowballs
Our biases operate in subtle ways. There are two popular phenomena you may have heard of.
Bias cascades occur when people become behave in a certain way because of how they think people around them expect them to behave. So if someone influential or powerful expresses an opinion, others may feel like they have to follow. e.g. if a boss expresses an opinion forcefully, it can suppress disagreement. You may only hear points of view that lull you into thinking that everyone agrees. And sometimes you just need to sound confident. “People tend to think that confident speakers must be correct," said Thaler & Sunstein.
Bias snowballs are more subtle. Instead of following an influential person, people may end up following just the first few speakers. e.g., if Rob, Chetan and Bhavya speak first and they agree with each other, others may reconsider a differing opinion. All three of them can’t be wrong, can they? As they say in Nudge, “Sometimes people will go along with the group even when they think, or know, that everyone else has blundered.”
So power asymmetry, or just the order in which an “open conversation” happens, can influence others’ contribution to a discussion. Much of this is unintentional, but it impedes a meaningful debate. After all, what’s the point of having diverse voices on a team if open conversation silences them?
Don’t take safety for granted. Earn it, instead.
In well-knit teams, where people enjoy strong camaraderie, you can often take people’s sense of safety for granted. This also happens in organisations that consider themselves “flat” and egalitarian. Safety is a tricky thing, though. It can be contextual. A specific topic, a group of people, or a certain juncture in time can affect our sense of safety. It’s as unpredictable as the human condition and can have little to do with your behaviour as a leader or colleague. So I suggest never taking safety for granted. Instead, be conscious about creating safety. And this is where I believe anonymity can be a worthy ally to open conversation. Let me describe three situations and how this may play out.
1. Retrospectives
If you’ve followed this site for a while, you probably know that I’m a big believer in retrospectives. However, retrospectives are most valuable when everyone shares their views without being influenced by others. No bias snowballs, no bias cascades.
So I always suggest gathering people’s inputs for a retrospective, using an anonymous, asynchronous medium. This allows you to learn about different opinions that people have, without attaching them to anyone’s identity. Once you’ve calmly acknowledged every perspective there is, you can all decide what to do with that information.
2. Design, ideation and brainstorming
I’ve said this before. In a business you want the best ideas to win and not the loudest voices. The best ideas win when everyone has access to all the relevant information. As with bias cascades and snowballs, sometimes open conversations can stifle people from expressing their opinions. It may also stop them from sharing some information. That’s not what you want, do you?
So even with design, ideation and brainstorming, it helps to maintain some decision hygiene before you head into an open conversation. In their book, Noise, Kahnemann, Sibony and Sunstein refer to the concept of “delayed intuition”. They suggest that before we decide, we must first take time to analyse a situation and examine all available information. This delay reduces errors in judgment. Moreover, you decide on facts than through personal preferences or peer pressure.
Delaying intuition is a terrific tool for design decisions, ideation, and brainstorming. Think about a few tweaks to the way you conduct these activities.
Before you decide on a design idea or a proposal for your team, write an idea paper or design doc. Give everyone time to share their comments and feedback on the idea independently. And gather these inputs before you get into a meeting for an open conversation about it. You can still exercise intuition after you’ve collected these inputs. If this feedback process can be anonymous, even better! That way you don’t conflate the feedback with irrelevant details of where it’s coming from.
When you run a brainstorm, give everyone a few minutes of silence to share their ideas anonymously. Tools like Mural allow you to run these brainstorms in “Private mode”, so people don’t get influenced by what they already see on the board. Once you finish brainstorming, group similar ideas together so you get a better sense of what everyone’s thinking. This is the right time to apply your intuition.
If your team doesn’t have an asynchronous work culture, make the first few minutes of the meeting silent. Make sure everyone consumes the background material during this time. That’ll help everyone have access to the same information. Use a collaborative whiteboard to collect people’s anonymous reactions about the topic. Once you’ve synthesised all that information, you’ll be ready to apply your intuition.
These examples are merely indicative. You can extend this approach to many other team conversations.
3. Leadership communication
Powerful people are influential. This is just a fact of life. In my consulting career, I’ve been in many interactions where you rarely hear dissent towards what leaders say. Most leaders operate with good intentions, though. Every leader I know is genuinely open to hearing another perspective. They just trip themselves up with the idea of open conversations. I suggest a couple of different ways to approach leadership communication, especially for contentious topics.
Seek opinions first and then state your opinion
“If senior members of a group want to obtain the actual beliefs of their junior coworkers, they will ask for those beliefs independently (so coworkers don’t influence each other) and, most importantly, before they state their own opinion.”
Getting people’s opinions independently (and anonymously in relation to one another) gets you more candid insights about what they’re thinking. If you’re a leader, then this also allows you to shape your own opinion and your subsequent message. That’s delayed intuition in practice.
State your opinion, but seek anonymous feedback
There’ll always be situations where you’ll communicate proactively. Indeed, that’s what leadership often demands. But if you expect people to share their honest disagreements in an open conversation, you’re likely to hear crickets. Instead, open up an anonymous survey or an equivalent medium to collect all inputs - supportive or critical. That way you’ll have a more objective understanding of how people feel about what you’ve communicated.
These approaches become vital for psychological safety as organisations become larger and more distributed. Each time you take a shortcut from such an approach, you’ll erode people’s sense of safety. Just a wee bit, of course. But before you know it, there’ll be a straw that’ll break the camel’s back.
Anonymity is not at odds with open discussion. You can use it as an effective tool to create psychological safety. Use it to make sure that you hear and respect every voice. By avoiding bias cascades and snowballs, and by delaying intuition, we can all make better decisions. More importantly, we’ll build productive teams and foster environments that encourage diversity. Isn’t that what we all want?