Decide by consent
I wrote last week about the dangers of decision-making by consensus - how it allows one small doubt to quash any initiative, and how it creates dynamics where groups talk themselves out of decisions they were ready to make.
One way out of this trap is to get very clear on how decision-making power is distributed in your organisation. This is a very valuable exercise if you're aspiring to develop a high-performance culture, but it involves some upfront effort. What can you do if you don't have that time right now, but want to escape the consensus trap1?
The answer is consent-based decision making.
A consent model is still participatory. It hears from everyone, and it gives everyone the power to say no. The key difference with a consensus model is that the default assumption is: things will go ahead.
That is:
Consensus - decision does not happen unless everyone actively agrees
Consent - decision happens unless someone actively disagrees
What you are being asked to "consent" to here is an experiment. Is this proposal "safe to try"? Does it seem likely that it could burn the business down if we did it? Would it be highly consequential if it turned out to be wrong (very public, or hard to undo, etc)? Or can we try it and see if it has the desired effect or not?
In any group there will be different opinions. If a solution is proposed, it's likely that some people will think it is a good idea, and some people not. The way to find out for sure is to try it. Real world experience is a much more reliable data point than speculative opinion. So we want to avoid getting stuck, in order that we can go ahead and try things, and thus resolve any disagreements with observable facts.
A consent based approach must therefore involve a mature willingness to move forward in the face of disagreement. And here's the thing: this willingness to make a shared agreement to try something is one of the definitive hallmarks of a high-performing team.2
At GrantTree, we adopted a model called “The Advice Process”3. Here is how it works:
When a decision needs to be made, a single Decision Maker is nominated who has full authority to make the decision
The Decision Maker gathers all the information they need to make a good decision
The Decision Maker hears feedback on the issue from anyone who will be affected by it, or who wants to offer relevant input
The Decision Maker, having heard all the input, draws a conclusion and tells people what it is
The Decision Maker asks: "can anyone see a reason why this is not 'safe to try'?" - If anybody withholds their consent (because it is not safe), there can be further discussion to resolve their concern and amend the plan - but otherwise we all agree to try it (even if it is not our preferred option) to find out if it works
Step 4 is really crucial here. This is the step where all voices can be heard, and where the full participatory power of this process opens up. There can be open debate. But there is one person who has the authority to call time, when all voices have been heard, and resolve the rich tapestry of perspectives into a single direction to proceed experimentally.
We do not get stuck. But we also do not have to default to strictly role based, hierarchical decision-making.
I think this approach is both beautiful and liberating and I encourage you to try it in your organisation. Perhaps you are already doing parts of it informally? Or perhaps you are using more of a consensus model and don't recognise my description of it? Let me know in the comments!
Consent-based decision making is useful tool to have in your box anyway because you will always find, no matter how well you specify the delegation of authority, that there are issues which don't quite fit. It’s actually better to aim to be approximately right in your formalisation, and then resolve things in a dynamic way as described here.
Patrick Lencioni called this "disagree and commit" in the classic “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”
We were inspired by (and took the name from) Dennis Bakke’s book “Joy At Work” about his experience founding AES (a power-station company in the US). The “safe to try” steps are borrowed from Holacracy.