The polarization effect isn’t all bad. What an organization needs from a decision-making process isn’t just to find out what the right decision is, because typically the point of making the decision is that the organization then needs to do something, and it will do it more effectively if everyone involved agrees with the decision. So a decision-making procedure that makes wrong decisions more often, but gets everyone involved onside, might actually be more effective in advancing the organization’s goals. Sometimes. Maybe. With a lot of luck.
When I was a manager needing to build consensus—especially with other managers outside my department—I found it much more useful to get one-on-one meetings to feel out people’s needs and negotiate buy-in well before any larger meetings. Trying to get consensus in a big meeting was a big waste of time, except maybe sometimes within my own department. The big meeting is really just an opportunity to show the higher-ups that all the other departments are already on-board with my plan. ;-)
This is an approach I recognize. It works well, except if many one-on-ones are happening in parallel on the same topic. Then you are either in a consensus building race with adversaries and/or constantly re-aligning with allies.
Yeah, this is actually one of the key takeaways of the arpa parc paper, leadership’s role isn’t so much to control or to make very many decisions, their job is to keep everyone lined up with a shared vision so that their actions and decisions fit together. Alignment is the thing that makes organizations run well, it’s very important.
That’s a great point, and I don’t think the takeaway here is that meetings have no purpose. Instead it’s that there are better ways to make decisions in a meeting or meeting-like context than most organizations use. People could adopt some of the techniques mentioned by the book authors to change the meeting structure, and still get the benefit of buy-in from having a meeting at all.
The polarization effect isn’t all bad. What an organization needs from a decision-making process isn’t just to find out what the right decision is, because typically the point of making the decision is that the organization then needs to do something, and it will do it more effectively if everyone involved agrees with the decision. So a decision-making procedure that makes wrong decisions more often, but gets everyone involved onside, might actually be more effective in advancing the organization’s goals. Sometimes. Maybe. With a lot of luck.
When I was a manager needing to build consensus—especially with other managers outside my department—I found it much more useful to get one-on-one meetings to feel out people’s needs and negotiate buy-in well before any larger meetings. Trying to get consensus in a big meeting was a big waste of time, except maybe sometimes within my own department. The big meeting is really just an opportunity to show the higher-ups that all the other departments are already on-board with my plan. ;-)
This is an approach I recognize. It works well, except if many one-on-ones are happening in parallel on the same topic. Then you are either in a consensus building race with adversaries and/or constantly re-aligning with allies.
Yeah, this is actually one of the key takeaways of the arpa parc paper, leadership’s role isn’t so much to control or to make very many decisions, their job is to keep everyone lined up with a shared vision so that their actions and decisions fit together. Alignment is the thing that makes organizations run well, it’s very important.
That’s a great point, and I don’t think the takeaway here is that meetings have no purpose. Instead it’s that there are better ways to make decisions in a meeting or meeting-like context than most organizations use. People could adopt some of the techniques mentioned by the book authors to change the meeting structure, and still get the benefit of buy-in from having a meeting at all.