Fundamentally, this is a story about power

Photo by AV.

The short answer is no. The Basecamp stuff isn't some evil genius strategy playing out according to plan. This is not the founders finding some terrible loophole to cut payroll costs. It's not some efficient way to clean house of all the people who care about inclusion.

Yes, those things happened. But no, this isn't what a carefully executed executive strategy looks like. Not by a wide margin.

This one is just as messy as it seems. And every time Casey Newton publishes another piece about what went down, it looks worse.

How do we know this wasn't a strategy to cut head count? If you want to know what those look like, rewind back to early pandemic where many startups were doing layoffs. Sometimes half of the company at a time. While many of those companies made headlines when they had layoffs, it was nothing like this.

In most of North America, you can fire everyone if you want to. You don't need a catastrophe of your own making to shove people out the door. And even if you did want some air cover to lay off staff, you could always point to the long-running pandemic.

So if the grand conspiracy version isn't what happened here, what did?

A familiar recipe

Found a tech company.

Market the company as being at the forefront of a new way of working.

Have a big mission.

Recruit employees who want to do good work for a good company.

Reinforce that employees are working for a different type of tech company.

Get praised in the media and within the industry.

So far, this is the story of Google, Facebook, GitHub, WeWork and hundreds of other startups.

The next part is about the employees. The ones that the founders hired to do good work for a good employer. Those employees view diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts as tablestakes for being a good company. The founders aren't opposed, per se. After all, they spent years being praised for being some of the good ones. So they tell the employees to go ahead on DEI work.

And while not all DEI work is identical in all orgs, here’s what often happens next.

Those employees have a lot of energy around making the organization more inclusive. For themselves and for their future colleagues. They advocate for a bunch of changes. And talk about places where the organization has fallen short. Around everything from hiring to feedback to product shots to team-building activities.

And the founders find that what started as a small group of people meeting once a month has started to feel much bigger.

Whoa whoa whoa. Wait a minute.

And this is where you can spot it from outer space. The founders are used to making decisions about the company. They made those decisions before any of these people showed up. And they aren't running a democracy. We don't all have equal votes about the company, what we're here to do, and how we're going to do it.

Discomfort is a signal

In most cases, it's a normal and good thing to pay attention to your intuition. You build instinct, as a leader. The more you learn about how to keep everything in your org on rails, the better you get at spotting trouble.

Trouble sometimes shows up as a bright red flag, but usually it's subtle. A change in email tone. Someone declining a meeting invite. A ticket that's gone without update for too long.

Any executive worth their salt develops an ability to notice when they have growing discomfort about something. And then pounce. The faster you neutralize the source of the discomfort, the less the schedule slips. The smaller the security incident. The less money we waste. The fewer customers we lose. The less damage done.

When that discomfort shows up, we're looking to you to act. Be decisive, break the tie, and own the call. As an executive, that's your job. You can see that language of decision ownership all through Jason's original post.

But not all discomfort signals the same thing.

Operational discomfort is about knowing the smooth flows of the business, and knowing when they're broken. Generally that discomfort is a signal of something you need to fix. And one tool we give leaders for fixing things is power.

But in inclusion work – in culture work – discomfort doesn't mean something's broken. Discomfort is part of the process. Not discomfort for its own sake. Discomfort as an inevitable result of confronting the places where we've fallen short. It should be uncomfortable to hear people on your team talk about times when work has let them down. It should be uncomfortable to hear about times when you've been part of the problem.

When we're working on the culture, we're not looking to you to shut down the discomfort. We're looking to you to listen. The discomfort is telling you something important about how it feels to work in your organization. It's your employees telling you how it feels to work for you. Where you have failed, sure. But also where they're giving you a chance to do better.

The bottom line

Fundamentally, this is a story about power.

Because as an executive you still have the power to shut it down, instead of listening. To put your own comfort and sense of what's "pleasant" ahead of what your team is telling you. To treat it like an operational signal that you need to step in and make a call. If you go back and read Jason and David's posts, it's all there.

Your people aren't asking you to be perfect. It's a strawman that lots of bosses trot out -- that they'll get attacked no matter what decision they make. Let it go as a talking point, because it's not true and it doesn't help you grow. Treat your own discomfort as a thing to get curious about instead of fighting back against it.

If Jason and David had done that they wouldn't be here. They wouldn't be on a team call, 4 days into an existential inclusion crisis, unsure whether to condemn white supremacy.

At time of writing, 21 people have resigned in the last 8 days from a company that started with 57. Fundamentally, this is a story about power. And it's an important reminder that, if you abuse yours, your employees will use theirs.

[Postscript: Just before we went to bed last night, we saw a new update from Jason. It’s what you’d expect and confirms much of what we’ve written above. They didn’t expect things to blow up the way they did. They have a lot of reflecting to do. But you don’t need a crisis to jumpstart your own reflection. You can get started right now.]

- Melissa and Johnathan