Leaders in large firms must deliberately keep diverse perspectives at cross-odds to surface hidden solution space, and learn when non-intervention is the right tool for political and technical debt challenges.
When a project spans multiple teams in a mature organization, friction from cross-odds perspectives isn't a bug-it's a feature. Hazel describes how deliberately allowing divergent viewpoints forces leaders to explore a richer design space, preventing premature alignment that masks complexity. The proof-of-concept she recounts succeeded precisely because the initiative was over-sized, creating intentional political pressure points that later justified additional resources.
The second insight is about strategic non-action. By framing every decision as an intervention, even doing nothing becomes a deliberate move. Hazel applies psychological affordance theory to show why tech debt often remains invisible: leadership never sees the right conditions, and product managers lack the visibility to act. Recognising when the environment isn't ready for an intervention saves bandwidth and highlights systemic communication gaps.
Together these lessons teach technical leaders to engineer healthy friction and to calibrate intervention based on political and psychological signals. The result is clearer stakeholder leverage, more resilient roadmaps, and a pragmatic approach to scaling influence without getting caught in zero-sum back-stabbing games.
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