Training Preamble
At Amazon, teams often define tenets as guiding principles to accelerate decision-making. These tenets represent shared beliefs that align team members on what is important and help prioritize decisions. Essentially, they are a framework that helps teams make consistent, informed choices—even in the absence of everyone being present.
The power of tenets lies in their ability to enable teams to make decisions autonomously, without needing constant validation. While they can be revised over time, tenets are typically stable and infrequently changed.
Defining Tenets: A Contentious Process
Defining tenets is no easy task. At its core, this process requires a team to make decisions about potential challenges they haven’t yet encountered. This can be both liberating and terrifying. In my experience, I’ve seen teams successfully use tenets to guide decision-making—and I’ve also witnessed teams struggle to reach consensus on what those tenets should be.
As part of a three-year strategy initiative, I worked with a team to define their core tenets. To get the process started, I presented a draft based on some principles the team had previously discussed but had never formalized into tenets. This draft sparked plenty of discussion—but not in the way I had anticipated. Instead of focusing on what the tenets should be, we ended up debating what qualifies as a tenet in the first place. Is there inherent tension between them? Should some beliefs be prioritized over others?
After the first meeting, I left feeling exhausted and uncertain: How could we ever reach agreement on tenets if we couldn’t even agree on what constitutes a good tenet?
A New Approach: Aligning on the Basics
For the second meeting, I decided to try something different. Instead of revisiting the draft immediately, I started by guiding the team through a 30-minute tenet training session.
The shift was remarkable.
The training session provided a shared foundation, getting everyone on the same page about the purpose and importance of tenets. With this common understanding in place, we could focus on the content of the tenets themselves, rather than getting bogged down by abstract debates about their definition. We then revisited the draft, applying the principles from the training to refine and clarify our beliefs.
The Key Insight: Diagnosing the Real Problem
The breakthrough came when we realized that the issue wasn’t so much about the team’s underlying beliefs—those didn’t change significantly. The real challenge was aligning on how to express those beliefs clearly and consistently. The training helped us resolve this issue by framing our discussion around the how—how we articulate our beliefs—rather than the what.
Once the team shared a common understanding of what a tenet is and how to express it, the process of agreeing on the content became much smoother. We were finally able to focus on what truly mattered: What are our core beliefs, and how should we prioritize them?
Conclusion: The Power of Alignment
In the end, defining tenets is more about aligning on the way you approach the conversation than it is about finding agreement on every specific point. By helping the team develop a shared framework for discussing beliefs and decision-making, we were able to overcome the initial roadblocks and move forward with a set of tenets that everyone could support.
Sometimes, the real work isn’t about changing people’s minds—it’s about ensuring everyone is on the same page before diving into the substance of the discussion.