Good decisions in a consensus culture don’t happen in the group. You build consensus one-on-one. It’s faster, clearer, and much more effective.
Does it take meeting after meeting to get to a decision in your organization? Do decisions you thought were done come back to life if someone later feels like they weren’t included enough?
In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss how to identify a consensus culture and share some practical tools and advice for making faster, more effective decisions while still maintaining the values that create a consensus culture. You don’t get better decisions in a consensus culture by just becoming individualistic and authoritarian—you get better decisions with better tools and skills.
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Episode transcription
Richard Lawence
Welcome to the Humanizing Work show. This week, we’re doing something slightly different. Peter led a workshop for a client this week, that I wasn’t involved in, but I’m intrigued by the title of it that I saw on his calendar, so I thought it would be interesting for me to interview Peter about the background and the content of this workshop and how it might be useful to other people.
So we’re going to dive into group decision making in consensus cultures, how to recognize what kind of culture you have, and some practical tools that you can use to make more effective decisions if you’re in one of those organizations where everybody needs to be involved in everything and it’s meeting after meeting, and you want a way to keep that kind of connection and inclusivity, but you want to make more effective, faster decisions.
Before we get into that, a reminder that this show is made possible by the Humanizing Work company, where we help people become more effective at human-centric, complexity-aware leadership, product management and collaboration. And if that’s something that sounds useful to you and our organization, go to our website, humanizingwork.com. where you’ll find tons of free resources, and if you go to the contact page, you can set up a free consultation with me or Peter to talk through what’s going on in your organization and see if there’s a way that we can help you be more effective. Now, over to the interview:
So, Peter, you did a workshop this week that I wasn’t involved in, on group decision making in consensus cultures. And I am fascinated by the title, because I think I know what that means, and I’m guessing your used material that I’m familiar with, but I wasn’t involved in this thing at all so I thought it would be interesting to ask you about what was behind it, what was in the course, and some of your experiences around that, that could be beneficial to our listeners.
Peter Green
Yeah, this was for a group of project and program managers at a pretty large company, and they describe their culture as having a pretty consensus approach to it, which was a little surprising to me, given what I know just from the outside about that company, and they asked “How can we get better decision making, faster decisions, decisions that are more durable, in our consensus culture?”
I actually started out the workshop asking them what kind of decisions they needed to make, and then asking them—I gave them a brief description of what a consensus culture might be—and then I asked them to evaluate their own team that they work with; their group; and then the company as a whole, sort of on a scale. Just to get a sense of whether it was really a consensus culture. And it turns out, yes, it largely is; and then there were decisions that they had to facilitate but they didn’t own. So the workshop was really about, if you’re not the decision maker, how do you facilitate good decision making, and how do you do that in the context of whatever your culture might be?
Richard
So, let’s start with the culture. When you say “consensus culture,” I know what that means to me, but I’m curious how you define that, and how one of our listeners could recognize, “Oh ya. That’s how things work here.”
Peter
I went and looked for what is the research on this, because consensus culture is one of those terms that people use a lot and throw around a lot, and I don’t think has a clear definition, and one of the sources of information I found about this was a psychologist, researcher named Geert Hofstede: and he has this theory called cultural dimensions theory, and he built this theory out to sort of contrast national cultures, like an eastern culture and a western culture or this country versus that culture, and it has multiple dimensions, but one of the dimensions that I thought was particularly interesting relative to this idea of a consensus culture is the idea of sort of a polarity between collectivism and individualism. And it’s really just a value set. What do you value? How do you describe yourself? What does success look like? And a collectivist culture will describe those things one way, and an individualist culture will describe those things in a very different way. And so I posited this as one way to think about it. A consensus culture is going to lean more towards a collectivist approach when it comes to decision making. There might be very individualistic parts to that culture as well, but when we specifically get to decision making, maybe we’re more on the collectivist side.
Richard
What’s an example of a pretty typical corporate decision, and how it would look at those two different poles of collectivist or individualist culture?
Peter
Let’s take an actual example here. Like, “Our original schedule was X for this initiative. We’ve learned that that’s no longer tenable; what should we do about that?” In a collectivist culture, there are going to be multiple rounds of meetings, there’s going to be a lot of discussion about that, it’s going to be a little bit fuzzy how a decision will be made, a lot of the time. Because the conversations are almost more important than the resulting decision, in a collectivist culture. In an individualist culture, they’re going to say, “This is the decision maker. The decision maker will make a decision on this date and communicate it this way, and then it’s up to the decision maker to decide how to make the decision and who to involve in that decision.” So, there’s some pros and cons, obviously there, one is going to get a lot more input, one is going to create probably more alignment, but is going to be a lot slower. On the individualistic side, it’s potentially much faster, but also potentially with some blinders on, where, “I’m just going to make the decision I think I should make, and I’ll take the consequences for that.”
Richard
In my experience, these are rarely explicit approaches. Nobody has said “This is how we make decisions in our organization.”
Peter
Ya, and that’s one of the—in fact, I shared three tools in this workshop–And the first tool I shared was “Let’s agree on how we’re going to make a decision.” And so, this is a method that we sort of modified from Jurgen Appelo’s seven levels of delegation, what we realized is that the top three levels, which are tell, sell and consult, which would be “I’m not delegating a decision at all,” I’m making the decision. Tell, sell, and consult are “when we’re making a decision,” useful distinctions, and then anything else is a group decision. People rarely fully delegate a decision to a person, but they might have somebody facilitate a decision. So, we said it’s “tell, sell, and consult,” and then level four is “agree,” and we got into a lot of nuance on different ways that groups can agree with similar tradeoffs. Speed versus more discussion versus more input: so we described three different categories of agree, and techniques there.
Richard
I’ve been in cultures where the entire notion of authority is suspect, and when you model this using Jurgen’s seven levels, you always have to start with who really owns this thing and then how are they delegating it. What advice do you have for people who are in cultures where even having the “who owns this?” conversation feels threatening?
Peter
I almost always go with specific examples, so I’ll ask them to provide me an example of a debate that’s going on right now, a discussion, a decision that needs to be made, and then I’ll ask them, “If that decision was made, who could override it?”
Who could say “No. that won’t work, we’re not going to do that”? And that tells you who actually has the decision-making authority.
Richard
Ya, there’s your actual authority. Whoever doesn’t like this and can still have their way.
Peter
Right
Richard
Nice. That’s useful. So when it comes to, if you decide you have one of these cultures where everybody needs to be involved and make a decision, and maybe there’s a sense of frustration that everything takes too long and is too fuzzy, what are some ways people can be more effective in group decision making in that culture without losing things that they value about the more collectivist kind of culture?
Peter
Ya. I’ll give three tips for that. One is related to using that method of sort of lining up the four levels of decision and who owns it, and as we practice using that, what w discover is that that gets clearer, the more boundaries you put around that decision. Like, “Should we delay the schedule?” is a really big question, and probably needs a lot of discussion. “What feature might we cut” might get smaller; “If we cut that feature what would the trade-offs be?” might get smaller– and so the first thing is to scope the decision down to a very specific thing. Put boundaries and constraints around it. So that’s one thing that really helped– maybe the whole group needs to decide on the big question, but there might be individuals that have expertise on a part of the decision, and they can own that part of it.
The second one is that good decisions in a consensus culture don’t happen in the group. In other words, you build consensus one on one. That’s a more effective way to go about it, rather than doing it in group discussion. And so we shared something that we teach product owners all the time– the stakeholder interaction map– as a way to map out “Who do I need to involve in this discussion, either because they should influence the decision or they might be impacted by the decision; and then how frequently should I be discussing them; and what should the type of conversation be? Should it be about what the decision is, about how we make the decision, about when we make the decision?” so those three categories turned out to be really useful in decision making as well, and to do that in one-on-one conversations. And then when we get together with the group, everything is faster.
And then the third tip that I shared was as you have those conversations, you’re likely to encounter resistance; and so a tip that we learned from Dale Emery the great coach, is use resistance as a resource. It’s information. Don’t push back, pull for more information. Get curious. And then we like to sort resistance into the layers that Eli Goldratt laid out: The five layers of resistance. Is the resistance about the problem, is it about the solution, the side effects, the obstacles, or collaboration of others?
Richard
I notice that all of these things have in common (sort of a go-to approach for us), which is make it visible, and think more clearly about it. Get some language to make distinctions and say, “This is what’s really going on here and that gets you clarity in a fuzzy culture or a fuzzy decision making situation.
Peter
That tip probably is useful whether you use those three models or not. Whatever way you’re thinking about it—if you’re trying to facilitate better decisions, make it visible somehow.
Richard
Talk about the distinction between approaching this as the person who is ultimately responsible for the decision or the outcome of a decision, versus the audience that you were talking to, who were facilitators who didn’t have the authority but in order for them to be successful, the decision needed to happen.
Peter
Ya. I think in a lot of large companies—probably in smaller companies too, this is true as well- the ultimate authority for a big decision ends up landing on some executive’s shoulders. But that executive doesn’t have the information; they can’t get deep enough in the organization fast enough or broadly enough to make a good decision there, or at least to get all of the information in order to make a good decision; and so using those levels, they’re kind of at a “consult.” Right? They’re at a level three. I want to consult a bunch of people. I want to get more information before I make a decision.
Richard
But it’s still my decision. It’s not our decision. So, somebody might disagree with me in the end, and it sticks.
Peter
It’s still my decision. That’s right.
Richard
I think that’s a nice place to land.
Peter
That distinction in the workshop was particularly powerful. Just to say, “Am I at a one, a two, a three, or a four here?” And going into that helps you know how to have the right conversation. And one participant shared an example recently, where a decision had been made, and they were having a discussion about the decision, and the people in the room thought they were having that discussion so that they might be able to influence the decision maker to change it, because they didn’t like it. The person who made the decision didn’t want to change their mind, but just wanted to make sure the people understood why the decision was made and to talk through the implications of that and how they were actually going to roll the decision out. So, to use that same model, the decision maker thought they were at a two: “I’m going to sell you on this decision. I’m going to talk about how it might impact you, but I’m not changing it.” The group thought the decision maker was at a three: “I’m trying to get your input on this decision. What do you think? And I might change it based on that.” And so, just that distinction of “Am I at a two or a three here?” was very helpful for that group
Richard
Ya. Sounds like a really useful workshop. If somebody listening wants to apply these tools in their context, wants to learn more about them, what are some ways they can do that?
Peter
So, we’ll post as many resources as we have on this. I’ll even put the slides up that I used. This workshop was a result of several discussions with this client, and specific challenges that they were facing, so we customized it for them. We love doing that kind of work. We find it’s most impactful when clients come to us and say that this is a particular problem. It’s particularly frustrating to us right now—can you help us resolve it? And then we get to work, really in a custom way with them to do that. So we encourage people to reach out to us, use the contact page on our website. Reach out to us and we’d love to work with you on whatever challenges you’re facing right now.
Richard
Thanks, Peter. And if you’re listening and you find this useful, would you please like the video on YouTube, and subscribe to our channel so you see future episodes like this? If you’re listening in your podcast app, it would mean a lot to us if you’d give us a rating and review, because that helps people find the show; and definitely share it with somebody else in your organization or somebody else you know outside your organization who would find it useful to make better decisions in a consensus culture.
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