10
Moving Beyond Consensus

We have all heard the quip that a camel is a horse designed by committee. For people in some organizations, the camel would be a welcome outcome—at least there’s some kind of animal coming out of that committee! Do you work in an organization that is driven by consensus? If so, then you may already be meeting’d to death. Consensus is one of those ideas that sound so logical when you hear it and then drive most people crazy when they try to implement it.

According to Merriam-Webster, consensus has the following meanings:

1a: general agreement: unanimity
1b: the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned
2: group solidarity in sentiment and belief

What’s not to like about general agreement or group solidarity? The sticky part is in that little word unanimity.

I have worked with many organizations over the years that have made various attempts at consensus-based decision making. What usually transpires is what we discussed in the previous chapter: in most versions of consensus, whenever someone objects to a decision, it is fair game to resurface the issue. And to resurface it again. And again. The basic rationale is that everyone must be on board.

You may have personal acquaintance with something similar to one or more of the following examples:

• An insurance company tries to run everything as consensus, with the end result that people spend roughly 90 percent of their day in meetings. They also suffer from the meeting that produces the need for another meeting that produces a subcommittee that identifies even more people who need to be looped in. You can infer the impact this has on people who actually have to do something other than attend meetings all day long.

• An aerospace company had become so enamored with perfect science that just about anyone could stop any program by raising anything from a doubt to a possible improvement. These constant doubts and suggestions led to all manner of schedule delays and cost overruns. The need for consensus— and its close cousin buy-in—had become so ingrained in the culture that the company found that it needed to create a workaround to its own consensus culture in order to get programs moving again. It opted to create a special advancedconcepts unit to extract lessons from years of building satellites, so that it wouldn’t have to rely on engineers coming into agreement each time they build a new version of an old concept. Employing this approach reduced the time to design and build one satellite from an average of more than five years to 27 months. Other companies in other industries have reaped similar gains by sidestepping the consensus mind-set and moving toward documenting and implementing their own internal best practices.

• A small training company wanted to move away from its founder-driven decision process and replace it with one based on consensus among key players. A leadership team of five was put in place with the requirement that the members agree on virtually anything they wanted to implement, from strategic direction to product development. The good news is that more people have more input; the bad news is that it now takes months to get simple decisions out the door. One witty member of the firm called the move to consensus the Productivity Prevention Process due to how long the group can discuss, study, mull over, meet, discuss, and discuss again before making even the humblest of decisions.

Consensus thinking could work if everyone really wanted to be on board, but that’s not always the way it unfolds. A savvy individual who may prefer something different from the agreement reached knows that he or she can stall things by using the ploy of raising doubts or disagreements later. People hang back for all kinds of reasons. Some would prefer to keep doing things as they have always done them to avoid having to break comfortable routines. Others are concerned that they may look bad in the new system. Some want to slow things down when they disagree with a solution because of the possible impact on their budgets or head counts. Some are apprehensive that new processes will shine unwanted light on their own performance deficiencies. Some have purely political motives and are unwilling to let something move ahead and thereby allow a rival to succeed.

DECIDE, CONSULT, INFORM

In Chapter 1, we came across the security technology company that is virtually paralyzed by its culture of inclusion and consensus. Inclusion is a positive goal, and it does not have to be paralyzing. The same could be said for consensus, although most of my clients are hard-pressed to cite examples in which consensus truly works.

The difference between inclusion and consensus is important. You can bridge the inclusion and consensus gap in a way that invites appropriate involvement while still enabling the organization to move forward. The workaround for endless meetings is to clarify roles, rights, and responsibilities of those who would be involved.

My former colleagues at Vantage Partners, a distinguished negotiation and relationship management firm, used a “decision matrix” to streamline the involvement and decision process. A form of the decision matrix that I often recommend involves clarifying three specific roles in any decision process:

• Who has the ultimate authority to decide something

• Who has the right to be consulted prior to a decision’s being made

• Who has the right to be informed of any decisions

By clarifying rights to decide, along with rights to contribute through consultation, you can differentiate roles and accelerate the process considerably. People with experience or expertise who should be consulted know that they have the opportunity to provide input while also being clear that they do not hold the rights to decide the final outcome. Those who need to be informed can relax in the knowledge that the process will provide them with decisions made so that they can go about performing their tasks later on.

This simple roles and rights clarification allows more streamlined meetings involving only those who need to contribute given the nature of each meeting. In consensus-driven organizations, it is common to cast a wider net for each meeting “just in case” someone may feel excluded or “just in case” we may need someone to attend. For most consultation roles, group meetings aren’t even necessary, since the outcome can be achieved in one-to-one conversations.

FROM CONSENSUS TO ENGAGEMENT

One of my large health insurance clients is working to reposition itself in the industry. Developing a new strategic direction will impact every business unit and every functional group.

This organization has a history of including just about everyone in just about every decision. That has meant that people spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings discussing topics but not really making much headway in either creating solutions or arriving at decisions.

The company was going through a massive reorganization as a result of the new health care reform legislation, and many people were unsettled about their future roles. HR had an internal careernavigation website in the works to help with the changes, but it was stumbling along through meetings, committees, and everything short of literal tea leaf reading.

An HR manager noticed that HR was tackling too many issues at once and, being subject to the consensus-driven mind-set of the organization, also making way too little progress. He also noted that those involved in exploring any given issue were more prone to reading the executive tea leaves to try to predict if approval might be forthcoming rather than proactively establishing direction and options. All that this did was bring on more and more meetings with more and more speculation, which in turn meant that little was being offered to leadership to actually see or implement.

The manager decided to try a creative workaround regarding the development of the career site. He invited people who he knew were interested in the subject to establish an informal team to jointly develop criteria for the redesigned career-navigation site. In effect, he gathered a group of people who he thought would have the right to be consulted on what the site should include. The team members then drafted a skeletal project plan and went about the business of creating a comprehensive SharePoint site (an internal intranet location for sharing data and documents) to demonstrate how they envisioned the career site’s working.

Once they had the site up and functioning, they presented it to the HR leadership group that would have the ultimate decision authority. They explained the functional design criteria that the informal team had jointly developed, noted who had contributed, and demonstrated how the site would work once approved. Leadership was able to see both the comprehensive nature of the design and the collaborative nature of its development. From there approval of its final release was practically a slam dunk.

The entire project was conceived, designed, and implemented within a matter of weeks, whereas the idea had been kicking around in various HR and business unit committees for months with not even a set of design ideas in place, let alone a functioning site. Rather than getting bogged down in trying to pinpoint everyone who might want to contribute to the design, the HR manager restricted the scope to those who had relevant expertise. Once they had the prototype up and garnered leadership approval, it was a short step to test the solution with people who were likely to be eventual users.

PROGRESS TRUMPS BUY-IN

Over and over, we hear the apparently sage advice that we need to create “buy-in” before proceeding on any new direction. In my experience, buy-in is a laudable concept that is also pretty much guaranteed to slow anything down, if not kill it outright. Buy-in, as pointed out earlier, is a close cousin to consensus. Consensus organizations tend to invite along anyone and everyone who may have two cents to toss into the discussion, while a buy-in approach seeks to gain support from just about everyone before moving forward. Organizations that crave consensus also tend to be the same ones that crave buy-in. The two processes both stymie progress by catching people in seemingly endless loops of discussions, meetings, and more discussions in an attempt to satisfy virtually every complaint or concern.

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Air Force commissioned a new, powerful missile-defense weapon that would require the development of a complex new technology. The prime contractor, Airco, had extensive experience building aircraft, while Satco had equal experience building space vehicles. Their combined expertise looked like a perfect match for the new weapon system. The multibillion-dollar program initially targeted testing in the early 2000s and full deployment by 2009. As is often the case in the aerospace world, the program ran into numerous schedule delays, some related to the complex technologies involved and some having more to do with the challenge of getting large numbers of people on board with any solutions or changes.

The initial test finally took place in 2007, several years late, but at least it worked. The customer agreed to go forward but with both eyes fixed squarely on timing and budget for the second test. Skepticism abounded, and the primary contractor brought in Marcos, a gung-ho Satco program manager, to lead the second test effort. He was tapped not only because of his technical capability but also because of his boundless enthusiasm for the program and confidence in the ability of the joint team to find its way to the goal. Marcos was resolute in his commitment to get this second test across the finish line in a year.

Hiring this can-do program manager may be considered the first workaround for this promising but troubled program. With so much doubt surrounding the program, finding someone willing to take the lead with high levels of enthusiasm turned out to be a critical success factor. Even the Airco leader who brought him in was skeptical, but the leader realized that without the positive, committed mind-set of this enthusiastic program manager, nothing was going to get done.

Marcos was worried about gaining buy-in from his 30-person team, but he knew that he had to get cracking if he was going to get this program across the finish line. He also knew that if he became preoccupied with buy-in, he would likely be spending inordinate amounts of time trying to convince those who did not wish to be convinced, rather than making the rapid progress that the program demanded.

I encouraged the leader to enlist those who were already on board, or who were at least willing to do what they could, and then begin moving forward with a small but committed team. Skeptics can add great value in the kinds of challenging questions they raise; skeptics can also cause things to screech to a stop while their objections are considered and considered again.

An amazing thing happens when you make progress. The valuable skeptic, one who is initially skeptical but still open, sees the progress being made and jumps on board, often enthusiastically. As the real deadwood skeptics find their club member ranks shrinking and themselves increasingly isolated by their own negativity, they are faced with two choices: they either get on board or leave. Rarely do you have to fire these people; they go away voluntarily because it gets lonely without a supportive choir to keep preaching to. That’s what happened here.

Marcos found a core team committed to producing a successful test, meeting or beating objectives regarding schedule, cost, and quality. Gaining commitment from a core team while the skeptics groused, complained, and did their best to demean both the team and the program leader wasn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. Nevertheless, the core team agreed to go for it, moving aggressively forward to the one-year second test’s goal.

Then, as they started to make progress, some of the skeptics started to become more engaged. With increasing engagement came increasing success, and the team crossed the finish line in one year and two days. Managers from both companies were thrilled, and the air force was ecstatic.

The “need” for buy-in can sound compelling, especially from rocket scientists. However, technically minded people can always expose one more wrinkle that needs to be studied, with the net result of slowing things down incredibly. Almost always, progress will trump buy-in, following the basic principle that nothing succeeds like success.

Sometimes the answer can be as direct as showing progress. If you are waiting for everyone to “buy in” on an idea, you may be retired before they all give the thumbs up. Instead, look for a few key players who are committed, determine what you can do on your own, and get on with it. Once you start showing progress, others will come around without much further discussion—a demonstration of the cliché that everyone loves a winner.

Remember: it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission. If you keep asking for permission and seeking buy-in, you may merely be giving people reasons to object. A more productive method is to determine what needs to be done and then present those in charge with something completed rather than an idea that may need extensive discussion. It’s a lot easier to produce that website, as the HR team did at the insurance company, and then make a couple of tweaks than it is to get the committee to come together to create the horse. Give your managers something they can see and touch, and you may have something that outweighs dissent or consensus.

WORKAROUND QUESTIONS

Here are some questions that should help you get around having to reach consensus:

1. Who will have the final decision authority for each decision type?

• Who is ultimately accountable for the outcome?

• Does the person or group accountable also have the necessary authority, resources, or support?

• Does the person or group making the decision have the right input from the right groups in order to make a wise decision?

2. Who has the right to be included by being consulted?

• Groups likely to be impacted financially by the decision

• Groups likely to be called on for implementation support

3. Who has the right to be informed of the decision or outcome?

• What performance requirements will they have?

• What data will they need?

• What authority will they need?