What I have learned as to do as an organizer both private and professional life:
Always assume the buck stops with you*, that people you’re trying to organize will not effectively volunteer the information you need to make an informed decision. If you want to know what the best date is, one of the most effective ways to find out is to choose a date, then ask everyone individually “does this date fail for you?”
To gather useful data rather than making a Dictator’s Decision, first go abstract: declare, as Dictator, that this meeting is a brainstorming session. Then tell them exactly how to brainstorm, like “okay in the next 3 minutes we’ll write down everything we can about X”. Dictate that they must spend this time giving you useful data. Then use it to make decisions. Other methods include creating a poll, sending it out, pinging everyone the next day to please fill it out, then two days after that pinging individually everyone who hasn’t yet filled it out. Or having a 1:1 with each person for 5 minutes to discuss.
Never ask for people to take initiative unless you are asking a specific person or are prepared to very soon after designate a specific person.
Recent examples: we’re having Christmas with 10 people. I told one “you are responsible for acquiring materials for communal cookie decorating. Do you accept or should I pick someone else?” I’m putting some people together for a game this weekend and needed exactly 1-2 more. I emailed a couple asking if they wanted to join. The day after, rather than waiting, I emailed again, specifying one of them, saying “reply yes, no, or maybe-but-we’re-not-sure so that if no I can email others”. I needed a design for a project at work. It is not my responsibility to produce the design. So I wrote up a design, put a meeting on relevant people’s calendars, and said “hey let’s discuss the design, here’s a proposal”, knowing my design was definitely flawed but someone had to produce a seed for others to critique. Two coworkers were supposed to lead a meeting to bring our team up to speed on some work they’d done in the past few months so that we could all participating in planning the followup. One said he had a fire to put out; the other said there are no more free times this week so let’s meet next week; I said that sounds awful, pick one of meet anyway, meet tomorrow missing one person, or meet two days from now missing one other person.
All this has a common theme, I think.
No one wants to risk imposing, so in the absence of hard constraints, no one makes low-stakes decisions where any decision is far better than no decision, and any reasonable decision is at most a bit worse than any other reasonable decision. Whenever it’s super easy to change the decision if it turns out it’s actually really bad, like choosing a date and then the main event says they’re busy that day, just make a decision. It’s pro-social. You’re providing a ton of value by allowing everyone else to avoid feeling bad about risking imposition. Far more value than the value lost by not having great coordination first.
*buck stops with you, or with someone else who is actually engaged in making this thing happen. Just never with a mere participant.
I want to signal-boost this harder than just upvoting it, because a couple examples could have been pulled directly from my life.
It should also be noted that I haven’t experienced anybody getting upset about somebody taking charge of organizing something after it’s been (unsuccessfully) opened to group coordination. I notice that when I’m on the other side of that equation, I’m mostly just grateful that somebody else is doing the work of organizing/coordinating things.
What I have learned as to do as an organizer both private and professional life:
Always assume the buck stops with you*, that people you’re trying to organize will not effectively volunteer the information you need to make an informed decision. If you want to know what the best date is, one of the most effective ways to find out is to choose a date, then ask everyone individually “does this date fail for you?”
To gather useful data rather than making a Dictator’s Decision, first go abstract: declare, as Dictator, that this meeting is a brainstorming session. Then tell them exactly how to brainstorm, like “okay in the next 3 minutes we’ll write down everything we can about X”. Dictate that they must spend this time giving you useful data. Then use it to make decisions. Other methods include creating a poll, sending it out, pinging everyone the next day to please fill it out, then two days after that pinging individually everyone who hasn’t yet filled it out. Or having a 1:1 with each person for 5 minutes to discuss.
Never ask for people to take initiative unless you are asking a specific person or are prepared to very soon after designate a specific person.
Recent examples: we’re having Christmas with 10 people. I told one “you are responsible for acquiring materials for communal cookie decorating. Do you accept or should I pick someone else?” I’m putting some people together for a game this weekend and needed exactly 1-2 more. I emailed a couple asking if they wanted to join. The day after, rather than waiting, I emailed again, specifying one of them, saying “reply yes, no, or maybe-but-we’re-not-sure so that if
noI can email others”. I needed a design for a project at work. It is not my responsibility to produce the design. So I wrote up a design, put a meeting on relevant people’s calendars, and said “hey let’s discuss the design, here’s a proposal”, knowing my design was definitely flawed but someone had to produce a seed for others to critique. Two coworkers were supposed to lead a meeting to bring our team up to speed on some work they’d done in the past few months so that we could all participating in planning the followup. One said he had a fire to put out; the other said there are no more free times this week so let’s meet next week; I said that sounds awful, pick one of meet anyway, meet tomorrow missing one person, or meet two days from now missing one other person.All this has a common theme, I think.
No one wants to risk imposing, so in the absence of hard constraints, no one makes low-stakes decisions where any decision is far better than no decision, and any reasonable decision is at most a bit worse than any other reasonable decision. Whenever it’s super easy to change the decision if it turns out it’s actually really bad, like choosing a date and then the main event says they’re busy that day, just make a decision. It’s pro-social. You’re providing a ton of value by allowing everyone else to avoid feeling bad about risking imposition. Far more value than the value lost by not having great coordination first.
*buck stops with you, or with someone else who is actually engaged in making this thing happen. Just never with a mere participant.
I want to signal-boost this harder than just upvoting it, because a couple examples could have been pulled directly from my life.
It should also be noted that I haven’t experienced anybody getting upset about somebody taking charge of organizing something after it’s been (unsuccessfully) opened to group coordination. I notice that when I’m on the other side of that equation, I’m mostly just grateful that somebody else is doing the work of organizing/coordinating things.