Two-Way Door
Chapter 25 of my ongoing story about workplace surveillance
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Stamper knew what she should do. She should sit down with Cascade and lay out her plan, get his input and his buy-in, and then launch it to her whole team at the HD all-hands that they had scheduled next week.
But she’d had it with Mitch Cascade. She knew how he’d react, knew exactly how he’d try to bully and cajole her into doing it his way, and frankly, she knew that there was nothing he could say to dissuade her from her plan. She couldn’t do it his way, and he wouldn’t support her way. So it was time for her to make an executive decision.
Was it this kind of thinking that led Keith Conn to release his Friction Reports to the whole team, instead of keeping them to “executive eyes” only? At the time, Stamper had thought Keith was just clumsy or—preposterously, she now realized—maybe even malicious, seeking to undermine her somehow. But she now knew that Keith had seen the storm clouds approaching long before she had—with his ear to distant rumblings of the data, he had foretold the slowly emerging resistance to the HD system long before their confrontation with Christopher. And he must have known that the only way to get her attention was to release the reports to the whole team, forcing it to the forefront of her attention.
But who hadn’t seen it before her? Christopher, sure, but even Dan—who only saw it from the outside—had warned her of what would happen if they went too far. And she had to admit, they’d gone too far.
Now it was time to step back.
This was, she thought to herself, the classic “two-way door” that was as crucial to the Amazonian way of thinking as any of the Leadership Principles. There was nothing that they had done in instituting the HD system that they couldn’t undo—no behavior they were tracking that they couldn’t simply stop tracking. But they had to want to do it. And she knew that Mitch Cascade wouldn’t support a step back.
That’s why she decided that she wouldn’t share her plan with him in advance, but would instead launch it full-blown in front of his very eyes, in the team meeting, so that he was virtually forced to accept her conclusions—their conclusions, really, hers and Keith’s and Christopher’s—or break with her and the team so conclusively that he would be left standing alone. She didn’t think he wanted that ... and she was ready to gamble that she was right.
Taking on the HD system on his own would require that he own the vision for how the system worked, the underlying behavioral modification mechanisms that she had developed over years. She didn’t think that was his game. Sure, he liked the ideas behind it—the push to eliminate wasted time and ensure conformity, to build “perfect Amazonians”—but he didn’t have what it took to manage a team to run that system. He could throw around orders and tell people what to do, but he couldn’t actually provide the insight and the deep understanding to guide its operation. Only Stamper could do that, and now she had to have the courage to test this idea.
So, in the hours between when she left Dan’s house and when she got to work the next day, she plotted to divert Cascade from understanding her plan, even while she prepared to launch what might well be a coup. Because she couldn’t see this move as anything but a one-way door: once Cascade became aware of her plan to back off the deep monitoring, he’d either have to get rid of her and take control himself, or he’d have to back off. She couldn’t imagine a compromise.
These were the thoughts banging around her brain when she arrived at work that Friday morning. She knew deep in her bones that Cascade would be waiting for her in her office when she arrived, and she was not disappointed.
“So, what’s the plan Stamper?” Cascade asked as she walked into her office. “I brought you a coffee so we could start talking right away,” he smiled, handing her a cup.
“Mitch, what a pleasant surprise!,” she replied, “but didn’t I tell you, I quit drinking coffee?”
“You ... did ... what ...?” He looked honestly confused.
“Just kidding,” she laughed, “thanks for the coffee.”
“Whew, I thought you’d lost your mind!” he laughed with her, and he looked about to start in when she jumped in:
“Mitch, I’ve got a plan I want to share with you,” she started. “I talked to Keith—yes, sternly, don’t look at me like that—and convinced him that there’s a way for him to retract some of his conclusions without coming right out and admitting he was lying.”
“So you’re keeping him,” Mitch accused.
“Yes, I’m keeping him,” said Stamper, “and he’s going to be even better in the future because he’s clearer now on what I need from him.”
“So you really laid into him?” said Cascade, relishing the idea.
“In my way, I suppose I did. My goal, Mitch, is to make sure he understands my vision for how we run the HD system. Believe me, he understands it better now,” she replied, knowing that she was telling the truth, even if she also knew Mitch would take it differently.
“So we’re going to use the HD all-hands on Tuesday to talk about how easy it is to misunderstand data, and Keith and I reran the data to come up some different readings that we’d like to share with the team. I’ll let him lead some of it so he doesn’t lose face. We’ll use that to ask everybody to recommit to our shared mission.”
“Do you want me to open the meeting with some blood and thunder, Stamper?” asked Cascade. “Just a little reminder that the big boss is watching and we’re not going to tolerate dissent?” She half expected him to rub his hands in anticipation.
“Actually Mitch, I’d like you to close the meeting, just say a few short words to remind everyone how important this is to the S-team, to the company. I want it to be your words that are ringing in their ears at the end,” she replied.
“Oooh, that’s even better Stamper, I like it,” he beamed, “and Stamper, thank you. You heard me, that’s good. I still think you could be a bit more forceful, but I’m getting that’s not your style.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve heard you loud and clear Mitch,” she replied, looking him directly in the eye.
“We make a good team Stamper!” he said, standing up and heading for the door. “Make sure you tell them it’s Day One at the meeting, right?” And then he was gone.
The office buzzed on the morning of the all-hands, buzzed with the anticipation that something was brewing, and it was felt by even those who had no idea what Kate Stamper was planning. It had barely been a week since Keith Conn, the affable but soft-spoken data analyst, dropped those Friction Reports on the whole team, and those reports had been the subject of frequent discussions—the kind of discussions that hushed the moment that Stamper or her boss, Mitch Cascade, approached, because they felt vaguely traitorous. Jokes began to circulate that Keith Conn must have only been confused about the LP “Have backbone, disagree and commit.” He sure had backbone, but this wasn’t what disagree and commit usually looked like. Usually it looked like “do what your manager says.”
In the brief agenda announcement for the meeting, Keith Conn was listed as one of the speakers for the all-hands, along with someone they had never heard of: Christopher Dourado. Would this be a meeting where it was announced that Keith was “transferring to seek another opportunity,” and this Dourado guy was announced as his replacement? Rumor had it that this was the way people who resisted Mitch Cascade usually moved on, if they weren’t just fired outright. But usually they didn’t attend the meeting to announce their departure. Usually it was just some bullshit “thank you” post on Slack and you never saw the guy again. Or would we get the rare “mea culpa,” with Keith forced to recant his reading of the data?
The HD team wasn’t usually a gossipy group—they genuinely liked each other and liked what they were doing—but this last week had been too interesting not to prompt a lot of speculation, and it helped draw a big team into the office. Even folks who generally took these all-hands meetings from home came in. This was too big to be missed.
And so there was an energy in the room as people began to file into the big downstairs auditorium. Cascade had insisted that he walk in with Stamper—“It will send the right signal,” he said—and Stamper had replied with, “That’s cool with me, as long as we get there ten minutes early so I can circulate and talk with people.” He tried to convince her otherwise—“They need to think you’re too important to show up early”—but she said, “Sorry Mitch, this is my signature move” and headed out the door with him trailing behind.
She peeled away from him the moment they entered, working the room in her trademark style, greeting people by name, asking about their work with precision and interest, spreading a positive vibe in a way that few could match. Cascade wasn’t used to arriving at meetings early and scarcely knew what to do with himself. He didn’t want to sit at the table up front—honestly, he didn’t see his name plate up there anyway—so he leaned against the wall toward the side, grinning at people as they started to slowly trickle in. He greeted the men with an upward cock of his head, and the women with a smile and a mouthed “hi.” As the flow increased, he’d add “Good to see you” and “Gonna be a good meeting,” but you could tell he was uncomfortable without a clear role to play.
Cascade saw Keith Conn walk in just a few minutes before the meeting was to start, trailed by a guy with a long beard and long hair who he didn’t know. Cascade half expected Keith to avoid him; after all, he had to know that Cascade was behind Stamper’s crackdown on him and his stupid reports. But Keith walked right up and said hello:
“Mr. Cascade, I’m Keith Conn. We’ve met before, but I don’t know that you remember me.”
“I know who you are Keith,” said Cascade seriously, though he kept a smile on for those around him. “I bet you’re glad to still be here.”
“Still be here? Uh, sure,” replied Keith, not sure where that had come from. Did Cascade fully understand what was planned for this meeting? Keith didn’t know—but he knew how to keep small talk going. “This should be a good meeting,” he offered.
“I’m looking forward to us focusing our attention on what matters,” replied Cascade. “Who’s your friend?” He turned to Christopher and extended his hand, “Hi, I’m Mitch Cascade.” Christopher got the full dazzle, the high-beam treatment, complete with firm handshake.
“The famous Mitch Cascade,” said Christopher, “I’ve heard ALL about you. I’m Christopher Dourado.”
“Heard all about me ... good things, I hope?” said Cascade, incapable of imagining otherwise. “You’re the person who I don’t know on the agenda. Stamper didn’t tell me what your role was ...”
Christopher would have explained—he didn’t give a shit about Mitch Cascade—but right at that moment, Stamper trilled this two-finger whistle she was famous for and called the meeting to order.
“I’m so happy to see everybody!” Stamper began. “Gina, welcome back, I hope your new baby is doing great. Vamshi, aren’t you just back from three weeks in India? Good job making it to this meeting. In fact, good job all of you! I haven’t seen this many people in the office in ... well, shit, ever!”
“Somebody—I won’t say who—told me that the big in-person turnout was because they expected fireworks from this meeting. Does anyone want to tell me what that’s about?” Stamper looked about with mock seriousness. There was a rustle of nervous laughter; god forbid anyone be called upon to identify the elephant in the room.
“Don’t worry!” she continued, “I’m not going to call on anybody.” And this time the laughter was more relaxed.
“I’m not going to call on anybody because I know why there’s excitement for today’s meeting. It’s because of the Friction Reports produced by our lead data analyst, Keith Conn. For those of you who don’t know him, Keith is here to my left.” Keith ducked his head and held up his hand in acknowledgment.
“Now, some of you may think I should be pissed at Keith for these reports ...”
Cascade, who was sitting in the front row, nodded his head vigorously in agreement, looked around for confirmation, and waited for her to give him the public dressing down he so richly deserved.
“ ... but in truth,” Stamper continue, “I want to thank him for his courage in compiling and releasing these reports. It’s not often that someone has the courage to tell their boss that they disagree with her, and steps up to present the data that explains why they disagree.”
Cascade was not the only one to wonder where this was going. It almost sounded like Stamper was praising Keith for these reports. Cascade and many of those around him waited for the other shoe to drop.
“Now some of you will say, Keith was supposed to disagree and commit—he was supposed to go along with the progression of our taps and interventions, because we had all agreed on advancing from the simple taps to the more complicated behavioral taps and predictive taps. Moreover, we all knew that the S-team liked where we were going. What a great chance for Keith to embrace the LP, ‘Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit.’”
Cascade nodded his head, and there was a murmur of agreement elsewhere in the room: many people believed that Keith had violated this principle and should be punished for that. Not Stamper.
“But guys, remember, picking out one leadership principle and using that to try to bully others into submission is not what we’re about. So let’s look at how Keith lived up to several of the other LPs. One, he ‘dove deep’: when Keith saw data that pointed away from our existing hypotheses, he didn’t look away or hide from what he saw, he dug in deeper, collecting additional data and looking for correlations between the different data streams.”
Cascade didn’t like where this was going. He sat back, crossing his arms across his chest.
“What he saw convinced him that the data we had been gathering did not reflect the full spectrum of possible reactions to our program. He was intensely curious about what else was there—I don’t need to quote this LP for you—and he was also insistent on us meeting the highest standards for data collection (there’s another LP), which meant broadening the focus of our Daily Pulse questions and not “leading the witness” by forcing data to only tell us what we wanted.”
“So Keith pushed on, gathered more data, and then decided that it wasn’t just him or the leadership team that needed to take ownership of the data, it was all of us, every one of you working on this HD team.”
By this point, most of the team was leaning forward, eagerly seeing where this would go next. The only one leaning back in their seat was Mitch Cascade.
“So at this point, I want to publicly thank Keith for having the courage to let the data lead him where it may, and for sharing this data with all of you. Keith has offered us this wonderful opportunity to—as a team—look into the heart of our data collection practices and consider how we want to conduct our program as we move ahead. Keith, thank you!” she said, and she reached her hand out to get him to stand up beside her and bask, in his sheepish way, in the applause from the vast majority of the crowd.
“Now,” said Stamper as Keith sat down and the applause died, “I want to introduce you to someone else who was involved in these Friction Reports, Christopher Dourado.” She gestured to her right, and Christopher waved his hand and smiled.
“Any of you who have read the reports—and I’m guessing that’s all of you—will recognize that there was an early source of what Keith has called ‘friction’ emanating from a certain product management team, and that this friction seemed to emanate outward from this team, spreading across the broader team and into other areas of the organization like a bad disease. Well, my friend Christopher here was patient zero in this disease: he was the first person to show a committed resistance to our taps, and in fact, he did more than that, he actively challenged good old Huddy and then Keith and then me to come face-to-face with some of the, uh, unintended consequences of our behavioral taps.”
“Unintended consequences?” laughed Christopher. “That wasn’t my term! I called them a ‘pain in my ass!’”
Stamper laughed along with him. “That and many other colorful terms!”
“When I first learned about Christopher’s resistance, I wanted to fire him, plain and simple,” said Stamper. “But then Keith showed me something I couldn’t ignore: Christopher was one of the top performers on our product team. His resistance to our behavioral taps didn’t impact his performance at all! In fact, what we saw was that resistance like his was most common among high performers. I hope some of you also saw this in the Friction Reports. It was this ‘correlation,’ as Keith would call it, that kept me from going after Christopher and made me stop and wonder what else we were missing by not developing a deeper understanding of the, well, Human Dynamics of the behavioral monitoring and modification we were attempting.”
“So, I want to thank Christopher Dourado for being such a pain in the ass, and for describing so colorfully and, alright, elegantly, how our behavioral taps were preventing him from doing his best work.”
Christopher, always willing to ham it up, stood up and took a deep bow, the only sign that he had any humility at all the deep blush that spread across his face.
“Okay, so I want to apologize to anyone who lost money by putting their bets on ‘Stamper is going to fire Keith on the spot,’” she said and, looking Cascade directly in the eyes, continued, “but I want you to know, I do not take vengeance on those who disagree with me. Especially when they are able to show me, carefully and thoughtfully and with a ton of data, that my vaunted system—our vaunted system—may not be performing exactly as intended.”
“I want to announce that today is the first day of our work on HD 2.0, a revision and improvement on our system that is designed to limit time spent on meaningless activities and make it easier for you to work, but at the same time allow everyone to have the latitude and the creativity to innovate, to ‘think big,’ show a ‘bias for action,’ and ‘invent and simplify’ in order to show our ‘customer obsession.’ We can not do any of these things ... correction, you can not do any of these things—unless you are allowed to be unique individuals and not, to quote my friend Christopher, ‘cookie cutter Amazonian robots.’”
“Keith Conn is going to be head of data collection for this new effort, and he’s going to need your help, so I want you to seek him out if you have a way of looking at our data differently.”
“And Christopher Dourado is going to lead a committee of people from across the company to review and improve our work. I told him I wanted to call him ‘Lead Contrarian,’ but he reminded me that if they’re allowed to do their work correctly, they soon won’t be contrarians but our biggest cheerleaders. If you know of people outside our organization who would be willing to help out here, please be in touch with Christopher directly. He’s on loan to our organization until we’re ready to release.”
“As for me, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing—but I’ll do it better, because these people had the courage to help me see the unintended consequences of our actions. I’ll keep trying to build the best and most human people management system I can build, and it will be guided by the principles that I’ve seen my two colleagues display. They may not be explicitly stated in the leadership principles, but these guys showed a moral courage and conviction that I think we can all use as an example. They showed me that even as we strive for productivity and efficiency, and try to use cool technology to do it, we must always, always strive to retain our humanity, our uniqueness, and our splendid weirdness.”
Cascade had sunk into himself as her speech went on. Both his arms and his legs were crossed, his brow was furrowed, and he seemed to be gnawing on his lower lip. So he had to recover quickly when Stamper said, “And now, I’d like to leave the last word to someone who needs no introduction, Mitch Cascade.”
Cascade stood, and he walked to the side of the room, to stand behind the podium that no one had used. “Well,” he stammered, “that was quite a speech, quite a speech.” He grinned, a weak imitation of his usual high-power gleam. And he pointed over to Kate Stamper: “This is quite the leader you’ve got here.” Only Kate got that it could have been interpreted as a dig.
And then he seemed to struggle for words: “I just want to say, um, that ... well, some of this wasn’t quite what I expected. But, uh, Stamper brought up a lot of good Leadership Principles stuff, they’re always good, always good. So you know, keep up the good work, and remember, it’s always Day One. It’s always Day One! Good job everybody. Gotta run to my next meeting.” And with that, Cascade turned and walked straight out the door. He did not look back.
Cascade’s stumbling closing words and abrupt departure did nothing to dissipate the energy in the room, the energy of 60 people turning to each other with a renewed commitment to the work they all shared. People gathered around Christopher and Keith and Stamper, speaking rapidly about the new things they wanted to try, problems they had seen but had not surfaced.
But other work called, and slowly the room emptied, leaving just the three at the front of the room. They looked at each other, acknowledging the crash of energy that was overtaking them all, the recovery from the adrenaline of the meeting.
Keith was the first to speak: “Well, what now?” he asked.
“You know what our buddy Dan would say,” Christopher replied.
“Oh god, what?” asked Stamper.
Christopher did his best Dan imitation: “After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” groaned Stamper.
And they all laughed.
<THE END>
impressive, Tom, congrats.
I miss 'Wizards' meetings that actually felt like that. Very fun read Tom!