Consensus and culture

An amusing video sketch about Swedishness is famous on YouTube. It’s even funnier when you realize that the Prime Minister in the sketch was the real Prime Minister at the time.

I had visited Sweden a few times, but my first real exposure to Swedish culture was when I joined Qlik Technologies in 2011: an American company with a Swedish soul, as they liked to say. I quickly learned about flat organizational structures and the culture of consensus. I slowly learned how valuable these approaches are, especially in building a complex, radical product that is integral to a customer’s daily work.

My team and wider network of colleagues were patient with me as I pushed through changes that were no doubt uncomfortable for them. We had outstanding project managers, Anders and Åsa, who nudged me along rather than pushing back. And my multicultural team of product managers and designers held on to the vision of the product through difficult moments. We delivered a new generation of technology which is still one of the leaders in the market 13 years later. That alone is remarkable.

I had come from a very different background at Microsoft. Consensus wasn’t much of a priority. If you heard the word at all, it was nearly always in the phrase “driving consensus.” At Microsoft, leaders had ideas and then persuaded teams to agree. And if persuasion didn’t work, pressure, overwhelming and sometimes none-too-subtle forms of bullying did the trick. The secret was to move your idea forward more quickly, with greater momentum and energy, than other competing possibilities. Nail your concept to the mast, seize the rudder and call it consensus.

It worked within its parameters. We built products, and we shipped products. I was pleased with SQL Server Integration Services and PowerPivot. Microsoft data products won in the market, but this was mainly thanks to the virtual monopoly that Microsoft Office had on the corporate desktop and among communities of developers. Still, it was a privilege to work at Microsoft, and I learned a great deal about the complexities and challenges of shipping enterprise software. However, Microsoft never achieved an authentic product culture: certainly not comparable to Apple.

If you look at Qlik Sense today or at Tableau - even after being absorbed into Salesforce - you will find coherence and consistency in those products, quite unlike Microsoft PowerBI, which betrays an unevenness of attention to the workflow of the UX and the details of features. It’s not that any feature is poor (well, maybe what they call Q&A), and some features are excellent, but the experience is disordered and transitions between phases of your workflow are clumsy.

Of course, PowerBI is undeniably the leader in the space, but that’s an endorsement of Microsoft’s strategy to build on its market power rather than a reflection of the product. It was always so. Much though I loved Integration Services, Analysis Services and Data Mining, we did well primarily by being bundled with SQL Server.

As an enterprise, Microsoft strongly emphasized leadership, not consensus. I always thought it telling that our leadership courses used the Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton as an example. His Antarctic expeditions failed, but he famously led his team’s successful survival and rescue in the face of tremendous odds: leadership in action. Microsoft leadership trainees didn’t learn about Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who planned his expeditions meticulously (and ruthlessly). Where others failed, mostly tragically, his team reached the South Pole successfully with a clear, shared objective and without disasters, although not without quarrels.

This brings me back to the Swedish consensus. It wasn’t all smooth. I made bad calls. We did have our moments of disagreement, sometimes strongly. However, my most important lesson was that consensus did not mean everyone agreed. You didn’t have to believe that a proposal was right or even the best. We came to a shared view that a particular approach was the one we would try. Objections weren’t buried or held back, but they did not become barriers. And everyone committed to the chosen strategy, even if they still had reservations: I have never seen people work so hard to make a tactic they didn’t like turn out successfully.

There’s a real art to this form of agreement. The Swedes found it much easier because it is genuinely cultural. They have been doing this since kindergarten. The funny video may be an exaggeration, but I could see a daily consensus forming in my team. How will we arrange the offices and furniture? What pub will we go to? What pub will we go to next?

The art lies in listening openly without clinging to your preferences, balanced with a simple willingness to object without clinging to your objection. The lack of hierarchy helps, especially in the respect shown to even the newest and most junior team members. Talking over someone rarely happened.

It was far from perfect. With my own imperfections, the consensus was often frustrating. However, as I work with clients today through the Qlik product stack, I can see that although it has grown very complex by mergers and acquisitions over the years, the coherence and product culture are still mostly there. It’s impressive.