The Deming Move

What a Harvard dean’s seat swap teaches founders about asking the hard question and getting the real answer

“Are you trying to get me fired?”

That’s David Deming, Dean of Harvard College, on The Founder Mindset. Reza Satchu has just asked him for the most controversial decision he’s made in the job.

A minute later they have switched seats, and Deming is interviewing his host.

Satchu let him. Most hosts wouldn’t.

When the tables turned, I became curious if I was watching one of his tenure-worthy soft skills in action. The line of inquiry intrigued me. And subjectivity- getting at the shoes of the other person was the soft skill in action.

I don’t think it was planned. He read the moment. Bold and disarming. And Deming had clearly been carrying that question for a while.

Here is what I’m calling the Deming Move: reconfigure the relationship, deepen rapport with genuine curiosity, then ask the hard question without judgment, and get the real answer.

Six Moves Ahead

The question of the hour moved from the most controversial decision of his deanship to the harshest moment in Satchu’s classroom. It was like watching a chess match, Deming was about six moves away before he landed his question. I have no idea how much of that is strategy or just a move made by someone who gets to the question he really wants to ask.

Deming had once sat in on Satchu’s class and watched him tell a student, in front of everyone, that he felt he’d wasted a spot on him. The student was sitting right in front of Deming.

He called it striking and granted that it must have had a purpose. Then he asked about it.

Striking. It’s a move I would make as a therapist. The word reports what happened to the person saying it and leaves the meaning with the other person. We know judgment or shame shuts people down. Deming left the meaning open, and Satchu filled it in himself.

Satchu explained that everything in that classroom is orchestrated. Then Deming asked the harder question. Are there people who could be founders and get turned off before they find out?

In my world, that’s the question every demanding coach eventually faces. The style that makes some athletes loses others before they find out what they had. Satchu said those are exactly the students he’s most excited to reach.

Deming’s 2017 paper on social skills opens with Adam Smith: we can’t judge our own motives until we see them through other people’s eyes. Right before he stood up, he asked Satchu how he’d like it if the shoe was on the other foot. The costs question did what Smith describes. It asked Satchu to look at his own classroom through the student’s eyes.

Why Founders Need This Move

Satchu gets founders to commit to their idea, pitch to investors, get funding and launch. But getting launched doesn’t always give founders all the skills they need, and so many blind spots emerge.

The Deming Move is the kind of thing that keeps them moving into years two, three and four. It draws on soft skills not often developed in the founders I see. By then the hard question is often for someone who believed in them early, and they have to ask it from the top, where people rarely give the boss a straight answer.

His paper argues that social skills make working together cheaper. A founder who can’t get a straight answer pays full price every day. A founder who doesn’t want one is making decisions on answers nobody believes and doesn’t know it.

A Room Full of Yeses

I think of two founders I’ve worked with. At an offsite, they walked their leadership team through the next eighteen months. At the end, one of them said, “Push back. I don’t want a room full of yeses.”

Nobody did. Push back on what? It never goes over well.

That week, one of their directors sat in my office. She had been employee number four. She thought the plan would break her team.

The founders heard the silence as agreement. They built the company by being the ones who knew, and a real question would have meant, for a moment, not knowing.

At the end of the episode, Satchu tells Deming he may stay in that chair.

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The Quiet Tension Journal Prompt

This is where it becomes yours.

Think of a hard question that is sitting between you and someone who matters to your work right now.

• When did someone last ask you something difficult in a way that made you want to answer? What had they done before they asked?
• What would have to change between you and that person for your question to be askable?

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