How Does Your Team Make Decisions?

I recently attended a talk by James Priest on the topic of Sociocracy 3.0, a collection of sociocratic patterns and practices for helping to steer and evolve organisations. At the heart of Sociocracy 3.0 is the concept of Consent Decision Making. It was discussion of this concept that got me thinking about how we work towards decisions in agile teams, the difficulties we experience and whether it’s time for a shift in how we think and work – a shift away from traditional consensus based decision making and towards a sociocratic consent based model.

I’ve seen many agile teams experience something which James Priest expressed as decision making by endurance. Teams locked in discussion, seemingly forever, in a quest to reach agreement on how to proceed or how to approach a particular problem.  At best this can be tiring and frustrating, at worst it can be completely ineffective as teams look to minimise conflict in order to derive a consensus decision, giving rise to groupthink. Difficult and potentially valuable discussions are often dodged for the sake of coming to faster and easier group agreement.

Many agile teams describe themselves as consensus driven, they’ll even adopt tools such as fist of five voting.  Indeed, Jean Tabaka (2006) lists consensus driven decision making as one of the characteristics that makes up a high performing team. It’s almost a given, even in the face of the issues above, that a consensus based model is the ideal way for teams to make decisions.

There’s another key issue that comes from consensus based thinking and one which is perhaps particularly worrying for agile teams. A decision making model based on consensus works towards agreement by the majority of the group. Innovation, on the other hand, often comes from the minority, with those willing to question the status quo and think about things in new ways. Striving for consensus arguably marginalises innovative thinking in favour of minimising disruption and going with the flow.

Consent decision making moves a team from a space of making decisions based on what is generally agreed to be acceptable to a model of only doing things if there is deemed to be no good reason not to do them. In other words it hands supremacy back to reason where a team works to decide not to do something only if it’s harmful to the flow of value.

Such an approach draws on the collective intelligence of the group, with the action of deliberately seeking objections helping to harvest information and identify misunderstandings early. It’s act that brings the team together, helps them to develop a shared understanding and to build an increased sense of accountability and engagement around their decisions. Consent decision making also keeps things moving forwards, avoiding the dreaded decision making by endurance, and aims to treat decisions as experiments. Those experiments should be good enough for now and safe enough to try, a tenet that supports the team’s ability to fail fast, to continuously learn and to pivot and adapt in response to that learning – their ability to be agile.

Key to enabling such a mechanism is the concept of equivalence. Equivalence is the state of being equivalent, having equal value and standing. In consent based decision making this means that everyone affected by a decision has the power to withdraw consent based on reasoned objection. Any team member has the power to raise an objection if they believe that what is proposed stands in the way of a more effective satisfaction of the driver. So how would this work in practice? Sociocracy 3.0 gives us a five step consent decision making process:

1. Present proposal (Driver)
2. Quick response and clarifying questions  (is the proposal understood?)
3. Harvest objections (reasons not to follow proposal)
4. Integrate wisdom (amend proposal as necessary)
5. Test proposal, succeed, fail, celebrate!

Of course, this process needs to be carefully facilitated, ensuring a practical balance between equivalence and effectiveness and keeping the focus on the values of the team rather than those of individuals.

This five step process moves us towards the sociocratic principle of conscious collaboration. Rather than being unconsciously pulled along into suboptimal and under-considered decisions we’re now working together, from a position of equivalence, consciously searching for objections and seeking out decisions that are good enough for now and safe enough to try.

Is this something that could benefit your team? I’ll let you decide that for yourselves.