Rabble Rouser, Seattle, WA

Seattle has a particular kind of person who thrives there. Technically skilled, politically progressive, mildly contrarian, deeply committed to the idea that things could be better than they are. You see them at coffee shops annotating whiteboards. At meetups presenting half-finished ideas with total confidence. At startups in SODO and South Lake Union disrupting industries that did not ask to be disrupted.

I met one at a conference this week. His badge said "Rabble Rouser." That was his actual title. He worked at a mid-sized software company and his job - as he explained it - was to go into projects that were stalling and ask uncomfortable questions until something started moving again.

The Job Description

His actual responsibilities were not written down anywhere. He had no formal authority. He could not fire people or reallocate budgets. What he could do was walk into a room where smart people had been meeting for six weeks without making a decision and say, very politely, "Why haven't you decided yet?"

Sometimes the answer was "we need more information." He would then ask what information exactly, and what they would do with it, and why they did not already have it. Sometimes the answer was "there's a political issue." He would ask what political issue, who the stakeholders were, and whether anyone had actually talked to them. Sometimes the answer was silence, which he said was the most informative answer of all.

The inertia in organizational systems is real. Projects slow down not because the problems are unsolvable but because the cost of confronting the real obstacle exceeds the appetite for discomfort. The rabble rouser's function is to lower that threshold - to make the uncomfortable conversation slightly more comfortable than continued stagnation.

Why Seattle Produces Them

There is something in Pacific Northwest culture that tolerates this role. Not universally - plenty of Seattle workplaces are as consensus-paralyzed as anywhere else. But the region has a tradition of building things from scratch, of not inheriting East Coast hierarchies or Midwestern deference, that makes challenge more legible as contribution.

The tempo culture of the tech industry here also helps. In a fast-moving environment, stagnation is visibly costly. When everyone can see that a project is not moving and has not moved for weeks, the person who names that fact is doing something useful rather than something rude. The cost of delay is denominated in things everyone can measure.

This is not true everywhere. In industries where tempo is slower and the cost of delay is less visible, the rabble rouser's function is harder to make legible. The discomfort they cause is immediate and obvious. The value they add is deferred and abstract. The social math does not work out in their favor.

What a Good One Looks Like

He was careful to distinguish what he did from simple contrarianism. His goal was never to disagree for its own sake or to demonstrate his own cleverness at the expense of a group. His goal was to unblock. He needed the project to move. Everything else was in service of that.

A few practices he mentioned:

He always asked about the easiest possible next step, not the ideal solution. "What is the smallest thing we could do tomorrow to learn something?" is a different question than "What should we do?" It is harder to be paralyzed in the face of a smallest-possible-action question.

He never left a meeting without a named owner for each unresolved item. Not a group owner. A person. "The team will figure this out" is how things stay unresolved for another six weeks.

He tracked decisions that were revisited more than twice. If a decision kept getting reopened, either the original decision was wrong and should be formally reversed, or the people reopening it needed to hear why it was not going to change. Revisiting without resolution is one of the main ways projects lose their tempo without anyone noticing.

The Badge

I asked him whether calling himself a Rabble Rouser on his badge caused problems.

He said it used to. Then people started seeking him out. They would find him at conferences and say they had someone like him at their company, or they needed someone like him, or they were trying to be someone like him and wanted to know how.

The title had become a signal. Not everyone responded well to it. But the people who responded well to it were exactly the people he wanted to talk to. The selection was efficient.

He said the worst thing his company could do was give him a title that made him sound harmless. "Innovation Catalyst" or "Change Agent" or "Transformation Lead" - all fine words that communicate nothing and attract no one in particular. Rabble Rouser communicates exactly what he does and who he is.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is make your function legible, even if legibility is uncomfortable.

Related

• Rabble Rouser, Benign Evil - the organizational function of constructive disruption
• Lame Name, Belmont, CA - what naming reveals about identity and aspiration
• An Evening of Pace-Pace-Lead with Chuck - how individuals match and shift group tempo