Managing conflict in decision making?

Man, that's like organizing a family vacation. You need everyone to agree on the destination.

Otherwise, you're going to Disney World with half the family sulking in the hotel.

How to Manage Conflict in Decision Making 

• Why Read:

  • Learn how to navigate conflict and disagreement effectively when making critical decisions, foster healthy debate, and delegate decisions appropriately.

• Featuring:

  • Jason Evanish(@Evanish), Co-founder / Head of Product at Get Lighthouse

• Link: 

  • “Food for Thought on Conflict & Decision Making”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Understanding the Importance of Conflict in Decision Making:

  • Point: Recognize that for mission-critical, big decisions, you need everyone to fully agree and commit.

  • "For mission critical, big decisions, you need everyone to agree. ... Big decisions need full buy-in: You can't have someone halfway in, or begrudgingly support a decision, if it's literally core to your team or company's direction. You need everyone all-in."

• Fostering Healthy Debate and Diverse Perspectives:

  • Point: Welcome disagreement and diverse perspectives to strengthen ideas and make better decisions.

  • "Disagreement is your friend, especially on tough decisions. Learning why someone disagrees can help make your ideas stronger by identifying weaknesses, blind spots, and risks. ... Healthy cultures include diverse perspectives: Zooming out from a single disagreement, if you want to foster a culture where diverse perspectives are welcome, you have to actually listen to them."

• Differentiating Between Important and Unimportant Decisions:

  • Point: Focus the debate and discussion process on a small number of truly important decisions.

  • "A key part of the nuance of what Jobs is talking about is that you need to be open to these kinds of discussions for your most important decisions. ... If this process is for 25 decisions per year, that's only ~2 per month. That gives you plenty of time to let some tough debates happen, without exhausting people."

• Delegating Decisions to the Right People:

  • Point: Assign decisions to the team with the best skills, experience and perspective to make the call. Add people to fill gaps if needed.

  • "The true value of having this type of conflict and lively debate comes from the people disagreeing bringing relevant perspective, expertise, and experience related to the decision. That means to apply this rule you should first make sure the decision is assigned to the team with the best skills, experience, and expertise to make the call."

Why its Temporarily Harder to Raise Series A Today

Why Read: 

• Understand the current challenges in raising Series A funding, the shift in investor expectations, and the temporary nature of this phenomenon.

Featuring:

• Dan Gray (@credistick), Head of Insights at Equidam, Guest Author at Crunchbase

Link: 

• “Crossing The Series A Chasm”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Identifying the Series A Funding Challenge:

  • Point: Recognize the increasing difficulty for startups to reach the higher bar for Series A investment in 2024.

  • "As we get deeper into 2024, there is increasing concern about the state of Series A fundraising. The bar for investment appears much higher, and fewer startups are reaching it."

• Understanding the Shift in Series A Expectations:

  • Point: Be aware of the increased revenue performance targets and valuation step-up required by Series A investors compared to previous years.

  • "To attach some data to this, we can see that the median step-up in valuation from seed to Series A has gone from $19.5 million in Q1 2022 to $28.7 million in Q1 2024. Series A firms seem to be looking for much stronger revenue performance, with targets of $2 million to $3 million in ARR, compared to $1 million to $2 million just a few years ago."

• Categorizing Startups Seeking Series A Funding:

  • Point: Recognize the two distinct categories of startups currently seeking Series A funding: pre-crunch startups with generous seed rounds and post-crunch startups with modest seed rounds.

  • "The result is two categories of startups that are looking to raise their Series A today: Pre-crunch startups that raised generous seed rounds and stretched the capital out as far as they could, to grow into inflated valuations. Post-crunch startups that raised modest seed rounds on more reasonable terms, with shorter runways and less demonstrable growth."

• Acknowledging the Temporary Nature of the Problem:

  • Point: Understand that the current Series A funding challenge is a temporary phenomenon caused by the venture capital high-tide mark in Q2 2022, and its effects will diminish over time.

  • "Fortunately, it's temporary. Series A investors are facing this today because of what happened two years ago. Roughly four years from now, it will be the turn of Series B investors to look at an oddly divergent class of startups. In six years, as it hits Series C investors, the ripples should be hard to detect."

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