Peanut Buttering

RFC mentality

At work we have the concept of an RFC - a Request For Comments. It's most commonly used if you have a proposal for a large-scale change you want to make, and you want to get feedback on your plan. You share an RFC with interested parties, and they leave comments on the document.

The lesser known but extremely handy use for an RFC is as air cover for doing something that you don't have full confidence in. In this situation, you don't even need a plan or a document or anything. You just start something you want to do anyway, and then call it an RFC!

Suppose you want to make a code change to "Make the Login button a brighter blue so it's more noticeable".

As the person suggesting the change, you might have thoughts like: I know nothing about the Login button, surely the exact shade of blue has a good reason and I just lack historical context, what hubris if I were to suggest such a change!

And as someone reviewing the change, you might have thoughts like: my god this makes no sense, but I don't want to offend them by shooting down their idea! Surely they've thought this through and have strong reason to believe the current shade of blue is terrible. Maybe I just lack context -- what hubris if I were to push back on this!

From these thoughts, many a great idea is never surfaced, and many useful pieces of feedback are never given.

But add three little letters to that initial suggestion -- "RFC: Make the Login button a brighter blue so it's more noticeable" -- and now you've got a big helping of intellectual humility.

By calling it an RFC you're admitting from the get-go that you don't know squat about the Follow button, and you might be on the wrong path, but here's your reasoning of why this might work. And on the flip side, it's easier for people to give you feedback -- by making clear your confidence level, you make clear the terms of the conversation. It's not "let me convince you why this needs to happen", it's "let's work together to figure out whether this can work or not."

For me, one takeaway is the value of an RFC. But the other is that the RFC label is just making explicit what's already true. It's already true that when suggesting the idea you're open to feedback on it, and it's already true that bold and strange ideas should be treated with respect and curiosity regardless of where they come from. The only bad outcome is when people are afraid to suggest their ideas, or afraid to give feedback.

The RFC label merely makes explicit the RFC mentality, and that is a mentality we can bring with us at any time, to anything.