Even if your are the expert, it’s valuable to take the time to listen to others’ perspectives. Engaging in such discussions can lead to surprising insights or beneficial outcomes for the expert. There are two key reasons for this. First, what is considered common knowledge in one field can often be a fresh, novel idea in another. Second, articulating complex concepts to someone outside your area of expertise can help clarify and strengthen your own understanding.

When Tellme Networks was formed in 1999, the leadership was very intentional in building what was an exceptional company culture. [A number of my former co-workers who went on to work for numerous start-ups as well as larger companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Invidia, and Amazon have comment that Tellme had the best culture they ever experience in a workplace] Often practices were promoted to reinforce our values. One of these practices didn’t have a formal name, but I thought of as the “Five Minute Rule” which encouraged people to place a high value on learning, mutual respect, collaboration, and efficiently getting results.

When new people joined the company we would tell them:

We are extremely selective in who we hire. If someone is working here, they are one of the best people in whatever field they come from. If someone asks a question or makes a suggestion, always take time to hear them out. You might be surprised by what comes of the conversation.

When I explained the five minute rule I would often share the following story.

In the 1980s folks at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)  built a directory service (think Microsoft Active Directory) that spanned multiple countries and companies.  Connectivity wasn’t always up, and several of the links were quite slow (56Kbit/sec). As a result, updates to the directory were having trouble completing and links were saturated by directory updates. A breakthrough came from the field of epidemiology. What if the directory updates spread like a dangerous virus in an epidemic?  This question produced the solution which XNS Clearinghouse scaled beyond any systems of its era. A description of what the team discovered can be found in the landmark paper Epidemic Algorithms for Replicated Database. Microsoft Active Directory, created more than a decade later failed to address issues in this paper. Sometimes people in our own field, who have done great work are also worth listening to. 🙂

The “five minute rule” was operationalized at Tellme in the following way:

Everyone was encouraged to ask questions or make a suggestion when they saw something that didn’t make sense to them. It was ok, if not encouraged to cross departments and to “skip levels”.  Line engineers could ask our CFO about the company’s model for revenue recognition,  someone managing external suppliers could ask the director of architecture about the system design. A VP in sales might ask an engineer if they had considered a different framing to a problem.

The other side of this rule was that if someone came to you with a question or suggestion you should always be willing to take at least five minutes to talk with them.  Ideally the discussion would happen when they approach you. If you were busy, you would schedule time for a conversation within the next week.

These conversations were always productive with a few possible outcomes:

• The question / suggestion reveals that there was an improve the “domain expert” could make.
• The question / suggestion revealed something that hadn’t been clearly communicated. The domain expert found they needed to be more crisp and clear in their communication. The person who asked the question / made a suggestion now has a better understanding of what another team was doing. This leads to deeper trust and alignment between the individuals and the teams.
• We discovered that there were multiple, legitimate approaches. We would need to agree to disagree of the optimal solution, permit the person doing the work to decide, and then commit across the company to support the plan. Once the decision is made we would remind each other of Barksdale’s “Don’t play with dead snakes” and PARC’s rule, “The person who does the work, makes the decision / drives the car.”

I came to deeply appreciate cross domain interaction while working at PARC. Tellme was the first place I saw it purposely built into the culture. I introduced this practice to every team / company I worked with after Tellme.

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The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice. – Proverbs 12:15