How to Escape the Brown Compromise Trap

- 9 minutes read - EN

We are all painters

The brown compromise is an analogy from the painting world. The story goes like this: if you ask a family of five folks living in the same house which colour they prefer, you may end up with a dataset like this one: green, yellow, blue, violet, and I don’t care (yes, this is not a colour!). You may also end up in a family (like mine) where one of the users (me!) is colour-blind and has a very different perception of the world than the other four family members.

If you don’t apply any other criteria and respect everybody’s preference, you will end up with a brown colour of some sort. More or less dark. You can also spice up the model and use more or less complex weight-scaling and even advanced mathematics, but you will end up in various forms of brown as you add more people to the group.Notice that nobody, in our example, says white. Nonetheless, most houses tend to have lots of white/clear colours. Also notice that very few houses are painted in brown.

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This type of decision-making also happens in a business context, especially in the product and design world. When you share a design document of any type (i.e: wireframe, Figma, design doc, product brief, PRD, press release/FAQ, etc.) … you will receive feedback. The feedback is used to decide either a go/no go decision or some more nuanced decision (scope, architecture, etc.).

Usually, given four stakeholders, you will most certainly receive different types of feedback

  1. I don’t care, but when can you ship it [I want your team to work on another project that has not yet been prioritized!]
  2. I will never use this [this is terrible, don’t ship it!]
  3. Can you also do X and Y while revisiting this flow?
  4. I hate it you should do B instead.

The feedback comes from various folks you must please, including stakeholders, direct or indirect reports, peers, etc. And quite often, the main strategy to get this initiative/project moving is the brown compromise: the teams deals with all these influences by trying to please everyone. For instance, given the feedback above, the team will incorporate into their A project a bit of X, a bit of Y and also more B. Doing this will lead to a brown compromise that does not meet anyone’s need and is complex, hard to explain, super expensive to build, support and maintain. The business impact will be low (if any).

Why do we agree to it?

Three main reasons. Each is psychological and directly linked to behaviour/habits related to our desires to please, serve authority and belong.

  1. Desire to [blindly] please others: We are afraid of the tension and negative emotions that arise in us when we disagree with people we love and respect. The other person who respects and/or loves you also has the same behaviour. Without a shared and strong commitment to being radically candid with each other, this fear of our negative reaction is a root cause for the brown compromise between humans.
  2. Desire to [blindly] respect authority: We were all taught (kindergarten, school. College, university, parents, family, etc.) to respect authority from a very young age. When an authority figure proposes something, we are very reluctant to confront this proposal directly. Open communication, trust and a safe space are hard prerequisites empowering us to be radically candid with our managers or authority figures..
  3. Group thinking: Group thinking is connected to our deepest fear as human beings: the fear of being rejected from the group. In primitive societies, being rejected from the group (banishment) was a death sentence! It creates, for every group member, extreme pressure to conform. To be nice to the group, everyone will tend to stay centred around what is agreed upon. The alpha of the group will help the group to come up with a brown compromise: his goal is to remain the alpha, and he does not care much about the compromise as long as the group remains together and grows.

The Brown compromise in a work environment: Product Management case study

In a professional environment, you are rarely the sole decision maker. For instance, a typical product team includes engineers, designer(s) and a product manager. Sometimes it includes additional profiles like product marketing, data, and other specialties, depending on the team’s needs (legal, security, etc.).

The cross-functional (matrix) impact

In a matrix team most members do not report to each other but report to another hierarchy. They are members of another group. It creates a complex group-belonging system. Quite complex for large organizations, way simpler for start-ups/smaller structures. For instance, inside the team, craft teams overlap with each other.

The hierarchical impact

At the organizational level, each team also belongs to another structure:

  1. The product team is part of another larger team: maybe in charge of part of the product experience (ex: onboarding, activation, payment, etc.)
  2. The larger team is part of another team: for instance, the whole R&D organization producing all the product experiences
  3. Everyone is also part of the same organization and ultimately, the CEO has global authority on everybody.

When a product team receives feedback from all these levels of authority from all these groups (with various levels of belonging and various levels of safe space), all the habits detailed above kicks-in at the same time. All these factors constitute a perfect storm to create a system that maximizes the production of brown compromises every time there is some tension or a decision that needs to happen.

In this context, many teams fail to make good decisions. Why is it? Feedback is always ambiguous and has to be balanced between internal and external (user testing) feedback. This ambiguity amplifies the three root-causes identified above: trying to please everyone, respecting authority and belonging to all our groups.

How to avoid the brown compromise then?

Here are three antidotes to the brown compromise behaviour. I think they are all equally important, and depending on the situation, you may need to apply a single one or have to work hard and apply all of them. The team is part of a system, and the more brown compromise a team has done, the harder it is to change behaviour: every decision reinforces the decision-making behaviour. It causes more and more confusion and more disengagement (harder to find an owner).

Clarify Ownership

Find a single-threaded owner! As we discussed, group thinking is dangerous, especially when associated with our desire to please authority and others. Important decisions should have a well-identified single-threaded owner, not a group.

Who should own a decision?

Usually, the owner has a set of clear characteristics: more context, more skills in this area and more experience. She is also dedicated to this project/decision (ideally working full-time in this domain and this domain only!). She is committed to this project/decision and will live with the consequences of the decision. The success of the decision owner will directly impact her impact review. The owner is the best positioned to apply the next two brown compromise remedies.

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On the contrary, once you have identified a single-threaded owner for a specific problem space/area, you can create a positive reinforcement loop.

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Define success

If you don’t know what success looks like, you cannot optimize your decisions to get there as fast as possible, and you will not be able to learn whether this was a good decision or a bad one.

Make it crystal clear. Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it measurable.

Share your success criteria and debate + align with the authority figures until you have a clear mandate. This is the goal of various product and design techniques like Product Requirement Documents, PR/FAQ systems, Product Brief, Design Doc, RFC systems, etc.

When success is not defined, unclear or partial (team only, stakeholder only, etc.), it causes more and more brown compromises to be made. Everything becomes less and less clear as well as less measurable. It, in turn, removes the ability for the team to learn and improve their success definition skills.

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On the contrary, you can create a positive reinforcement loop when you define clearly success criteria for a decision that will lead to more learnings and less brown compromises:

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Breath: create time for yourself and for the team !

Making a decision is, by nature, uncomfortable: it is always ambiguous and involves the future. It causes stress. When stressed, we want to fight or flee the scene. We want to get it done as fast as possible. In these situations, we revert to our habits (feelings, authority, group thinking). The more stressed you are, the worse your decisions will be. This section applies only to irreversible/hard decisions: please don’t slow down the easy/reversible decisions!

As an individual: breathe! And breathe again. And again (you need at least three breaths!).

At the team level, it will take more than a few breaths to succeed (but this is an excellent start!). You need to create the space required to gather context, gather evidence, formulate hypotheses, test them, understand and formulate the trade-offs and then decide. You also need time to apply the two precedent antidotes (find an owner, and set-up well-defined success criteria).

Use delay to create a breathing space for the team. Manage expectations by asking (for instance) for a two-week period where the team will have time to breathe, hold the tension and unpack what is essential. Make it a high-integrity commitment to come back with the stakeholder at a specific date and time with the team proposal.

Without time to process the feedback, you will have a brown compromise, a team that feels stressed, reactive and more and more disengaged.

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On the other hand, for hard and difficult decisions, with a realistic timeline, you will be able to find an owner, define success criteria, find relevant data, align internally and with stakeholders to make a great decision while leveraging the stress to create a positive momentum for the team.

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Proactivity leads to empowerment, reactivity leads to disengagement.

Conclusion

The brown compromise is a helpful concept to master at any point in time. Processes, tools and culture within organizations are the root cause of producing lots or few brown compromises. Teams and individuals can influence organizations (within their team) but ultimately, this is a leadership and systemic issue.

Thankfully, we have seen three antidotes that can prevent the problem altogether: Find a single-threaded owner (who will champion the decision) Define success (crystal clear, simple, memorable, measurable) Breath (create breathing time for the team)

Applying these antidotes consistently leads to the continuous growth of team members, teams of teams and of the organization. It creates the mental space for everyone to contribute meaningfully, increasing the quality of decisions over time. Think of it as compounding interests for your bank account. It leads to more peace of mind (breathe!) and a proactive team that is not afraid to tackle hard and ambiguous problems.

These antidotes are not a blanket guarantee that every brown compromise will be avoided, but it will maximize the probability of making a better decision, and provide the team with more autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Progression over perfection!

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