From Good to Wise: A Guide to Better Decisions
At Airtasker, we face challenging and complex problems. Because our culture is highly collaborative, the quality of our conversations is critical for the quality of our work. Poor conversations lead to inadequate solutions that have unintended side effects. Conversations that meet the full complexity of the problem lead to solutions that are high quality and in the long term interests of the company.
Conversations occur in various ways and formats: online, informally in our social spaces, in 1:1’s and frequent meetings. Although decisions form through all these interactions, it’s in meetings where we typically decide together, often navigating multiple and opposing perspectives to do so. What we are seeking to do is make wise decisions.
Wise decisions take into account what needs to be taken into account for long term beneficial outcomes — T. Atlee
Recognising this, we’ve rolled out initiatives and education to improve the quality of conversations in our meetings and nurture wise decisions. In this article, I’ll detail warning signs for conversations that are less than healthy and provide four simple steps you can take to nurture conversations that encompass full complexity, rather than reductive or partial reasoning.
Warning signs
Have you noticed any of the following in your meetings?
- Meeting dominated by one or more individuals
- Two people having a back and forth conversation that is irrelevant to most participants, hard to interject into, or becoming defensive
- New idea shutdown
- Forced agreement
- Long monologues
- Dead energy characterised by minimal participation and engagement
These signs indicate meeting dynamics where participants are disengaged and struggling to contribute. This lack of participation can lead to decisions that miss essential insights and lack creativity and buy-in.
Navigating difficult decisions
It is easy to make the right decision when the solution is self-evident. But difficulty quickly ramps up when disagreement shows up. Often, this difficulty is felt as palpable discomfort in the room.
Although language is natural for us, skilfull communication isn’t, and even more so when we disagree. If a disagreement doesn’t lead us to disengage, we typically begin to debate. Debate is characterised by firmly held positions that are strongly argued. Entrenched positions make it difficult to listen well and find common ground. One side typically wins, but the outcome is often subpar because valuable insights from opposing views aren’t well integrated. The result doesn’t grasp the full complexity of the issue.
So what else is possible? Instead of debate, aim for a dialogic mode of communication.
Dialogic communication is remaining in the tension between standing your own ground and being profoundly open to the other — W. Pearce
Dialogic communication, or dialogue, naturally promotes creativity that can synthesise useful insights from multiple positions into new solutions. Dialogic communication doesn’t arise naturally (yet!), but you can design for it making its emergence more likely.
Designing quality conversations
Great group conversations can be designed for in the same way that great software and construction are the results of thoughtful design. Instead of an architect or an engineer, the designer for a conversation is known as a facilitator. It is their role to attend to the group’s process, model healthy communication and support the emergence of wise outcomes.
Airtasker has several engineering schools that enable developers who work on the same codebase to come together to discuss and decide technical convention and direction. Our engineering schools range in size from five to nearly twenty people. The school conversations, although useful, did struggle at times, especially when there was disagreement or a lack of clarity.
To improve this, we took steps to both bring attention to and raise the quality of the conversations held in schools.
Four simple steps for dialogic communication
- Recognising the importance of facilitation
- Clarifying purpose
- Shared airtime
- Group norms
1. Recognising the importance of facilitation
Although our schools had volunteers who convened the meetings, the role of facilitation wasn’t discussed or widely understood. Skilled facilitation develops with theory and practice, but there are basics that are simple and effective. To raise awareness of the importance of facilitation we ran a company-wide session on facilitation and conversation design. Following that we created a regular community of practice that allows those interested, to continue improving their skills.
Now facilitation is recognised as valuable, all school meetings have someone actively playing that role. During project meetings, we also see individuals volunteer to facilitate or use guerrilla facilitation if the group energy becomes chaotic or the subject material complexifies. This attention to the value of facilitation has allowed us to navigate difficult and complicated conversations that might not have been possible before.
2. Clarifying purpose
Don’t underestimate the importance of clarifying the purpose of your meetings. For each school, we ran a reflection meeting where participants had the opportunity to reflect on why they were meeting and what they should expect to achieve together.
Ensuring everyone knows what they are seeking to do together enables people to participate comfortably and also push conversations towards desired outcomes. In one case, this attention to purpose led to a school renaming itself to better reflect its role as a learning and discussion space rather than a decision-making group, enabling a greater sense of shared purpose.
3. Shared airtime
One of the most straightforward steps to bringing about dialogic communication is ensuring everyone can share their perspective and feel heard. We all participate in group conversations differently. Loud and confident individuals tend to speak the moment a break in the conversation presents (or even before!). Quieter individuals may require a pause of a few seconds before speaking. If you don’t specifically attend to shared airtime, insights held by softer voices are rarely heard, and your decisions will lack thoroughness. Shared airtime mechanisms are important once meetings reach six or more individuals but also help in hard conversations for smaller groups.
A common mechanism introduced at Airtasker was the speaking list. The facilitator manages a list of who is speaking next — if you wish to talk you indicate to the facilitator, who adds your name to the list, so you can speak in turn.
4. Group norms
Group norms are implicit or explicit behavioural rules that exist in groups. All of us follow norms in social situations we participate in, whether we recognise them or not. Examples norms are making decisions by majority voting, raising your hand to speak, and always going for a meal and drink at the close of the meeting.
Rather than letting group norms be implicit and unconscious, take time to set them explicitly. Explicit norms reduce friction by creating an upfront agreement on how to navigate disagreements and hard decisions. Norms also make it easier for participants to call out unhealthy group dynamics and reset the conversation.
Below are examples of norms from Airtasker’s teams and schools, covering decision making, meeting health, participation and action items.
- We use supermajority (more than 66% agree) voting as an initial mechanism, check for blocking concerns, and escalate if necessary
- We avoid being distracted by laptops and phones (e.g. silent mode) during meetings
- We save 10 minutes at the end of school meetings to share what we’re working on
- We make sure everyone’s voice is heard. If a conversation between a few people gets too deep and not everyone wants to be involved we park it for another meeting/conversation
- We leave the room explicitly understanding and agreeing on ownership and timeframes
Our work on the quality of conversations led to energy shifts in schools, and a felt improvement also quantified in surveys. Importantly, care for conversation quality has taken on greater importance more broadly at the company. It’s hard to predict the long term impact of having wiser conversations, but for now, our meetings are more engaging and have better outcomes.
By raising the quality of our conversations, we create space for dialogic communication, and importantly, wise outcomes that grapple with the complexity of the challenges we face. If you’ve also been exploring this space, or have feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Please reach out.
