Why Consensus is Great for Sex, but Bad for Business

Making decisions is tough. And decisions are usually the main thing standing between the status quo and having what we want. This is true in both business and our personal lives.

Picking the right mate, partner, or employee; choosing the right product, technology stack, market, or strategy; selecting the right neighborhood and school for your kids: it all comes down to decision making.

Business leaders are always trying to build consensus, and sex educators talk about consent. I’m convinced we’ve got these two things reversed.

The winning move in love is consensus and the winning move in business is consent. Let me explain.

Consent v. Consensus

The difference between consent and consensus can be found in the way we talk about them.

We reach consensus when all parties involved agree that whatever is about to happen is a good (hopefully great) idea. And we receive consent when one party doesn’t block the other.

Consensus is more about collective action, while consent, even if enthusiastic, has a feeling of acquiescence built into it.

In a consensus, all impacted parties are active, but with consent, one person makes a request while others remain mostly passive.

Because love and business are very different contexts, they need very different approaches to decision making.

In business, your decisions impact outcomes with your customer and market. They are complex, and benefit from the integration of multiple data points and a variety of opinions.

In love and sex, your decisions impact just the people making the decision (I would hope there aren’t a bunch of people weighing in on your sex life!).

Love/sex decisions go much better when there is enthusiastic support from all parties involved. No one wants to date someone who only “kind of” wants to go out with them. Dates are best when everyone is psyched. We may want enthusiasm in business too, but a lack of it doesn’t hamstring the outcome the way it does in love.

While there is little risk involved in not going on a date with someone, most business decisions are very sensitive to time. In business not making a decision is a de facto decision — and usually a bad one.

If you don’t decide to kill a project, you are actually deciding to keep it running — and keep resources tied up in it. If you don’t decide to limit your focus on a few features, you’re deciding to delay the release of all the features you’re building.

With markets and technology moving faster than ever, our businesses also need to move quickly. Without clear decisions, teams lose focus, failing projects limp along, and opportunities are missed.

We are in a world of almost continuous change, and that means one of almost continuous decision making. In this environment, the cost of a missing decision can be far higher than the cost of a mediocre one — especially if you’ve created a context where decisions can be undone or changed easily.

To succeed, our businesses need to “test and learn”, which means they need to be able to make decisions and also adjust or back out of decisions that have already been made. So it pays to set your business team’s default to accept a proposal and move forward, rather than endlessly debate.

Consent-based decision making is foundational to organizational agility because it creates a context where decisions happen quickly, and where they can be undone or altered as new data appears.

In love, however, we don’t want haste or compromise, we want the agreement that doing something together — a date, sex, marriage — is a great idea. Here, a 99% “yes” should be treated as a 100% “no.”

In love, we want to be cautious and move at the rate of the most reticent person. That person can, of course, act in a spirit of generosity and curiosity — what sex advice columnist Dan Savage calls Good, Giving, and Game (GGG) — but they should not do so because they are pressured or are operating out of scarcity or fear.

This means the couple has reached consensus that something is a great idea, instead of one person granting consent to the other.

Consent-Based Decision Making

We know that collaborative decision making is essential in business — our operations are complex and input from a team improves any plan.

Consent-based decision making works by keeping your team’s focus on either strengthening the plan or proving it’s a bad idea. These are the only two outcomes you should care about anyway.

This focus means your team is less likely to get stuck in a debate — which are usually unfocused sharings of thoughts and opinions, not focused efforts to take action. And action is the only thing that matters in business.

A facilitator and a formal process can help, but they aren’t always necessary to get started with consent-based decision making. To try it out ask your team to if a proposed action is “safe to try.” You can bring the proposal yourself or you can bring a problem and ask the team for proposals to solve it.

If a problem is really big and complex then you can ask a small team to research for a time and bring their best proposal to a meeting in a week or two.

During a decision-making meeting the proposer will state the problem and the proposal and give participants a chance to ask questions to clarify their understanding of the proposal, offer possible improvements, and even share emotional reactions. The proposer can answer questions of course but should avoid argument or debate around reactions.

Once all the reactions are in, the proposer can modify the proposal — which may begin a new round of questions and reactions. When all questions have been answered, and reactions have been heard, the proposer or facilitator calls for a vote.

The vote asks only one question: “is this proposal safe for our business or team to try?” If anyone votes “no” they must present evidence why it’s not. Not “liking” a proposal is not sufficient grounds for voting against it. You must bring substantial reasoning to your no vote or it will be discounted.

If no one votes “no” they are consenting to the decision and the team is able to move forward decisively.

At the next meeting anyone can bring a proposal to the next meeting that either alters or eliminates a previous decision. This allows for new insights and information to be incorporated quickly into business operations.

Consent based decision making is a fast and flexible process that keeps you and your team experiment-minded and helps tease out real threats and weaknesses while still being action-biased as a group.

This kind of organizational agility is can create be an essential competitive advantage in today’s fast paced business environment.

The Takeaway

Consent, even if enthusiastic, implies that one person is asking and the other is granting. In a sexual or interpersonal context, we want both parties to agree equally that something is an awesome idea — this is consensus.

But in business, consensus, even if carefully built, is too slow and ponderous a process. In order to create operational agility, we need to build consent-based decision making into our organization’s culture.