Who decided that?!
Getting a decision in a distributed team
“In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly” — Mark Sanborn
Working in a distributed team can be hard 😫! For example making and documenting decisions in a distributed team is a challenge. But it’s a challenge we can easily overcome with a simple protocol. We developed, tested and refined that decision making protocol at my company Dreimannzelt. It may also improve your team decisions…
The distributed environment
Compared to co-located teams, distributed teams have to work twice as hard on communicating 📣. Most teams use a combination of video calls and a group chat to bridge the gap. Group chat tools like Flowdock or Slack are very popular — and they support the decision making protocol very well.
The problem
So it seems simple to ask for a decision on the group chat. But there are challenges:
- Not every team member is always present 🏃💨
- It’s not always clear that team members need to take action 😕
- Replies might be vague or contain clarifying questions 🤡
- It’s hard to track who already stated his decision 🗳
- Objections might be overlooked ☝️
- The decider might rush ahead, even if not everybody agreed yet 😇
- Decisions are poorly documented 🔦
All these challenges can be overcome, if you put in extra effort. You could PM everyone separately and document the decision outside of the group chat for example. But in reality, noone puts in such effort for every decision— and even if you would, it takes a lot of your precious time. So let’s try to find something simpler…
The decision protocol
General template
A “protocol” is simply a communication template everyone agrees upon. In a decision process, we have two general steps:
- Someone asks for a decision ❓
- Everyone else needs to say “yes” or “no”. 👍👎
1. Asking for a decision ❓
In the first step, you should clearly mark the decision as such. That way the team knows that they need to take action and reply. It is also necessary to give some minimum context to understand what the decision is about.
We use a tag to mark decisions in our group chat. The tag is simply #decision. A tag easily stands out in the group chat and everybody on the team knows what to do. The tag also makes the decision easy to find later on, which alleviates the pain of documentation.
2. Replying 👍👎
In the second step, team members need to make clear whether they already took a decision. Sometimes they have questions that might be misunderstood as agreement or rejection.
Again we use tags for the reply to a decision. After some experimenting we opted agains simple yes and no tags. The reason is simple: Many decision have a sensible default reply. Think of this decision for example: “If noone needs me on the project, I’d like to take Monday off next week #decision”. We don’t expect everyone to check that this team member has enough vacation days left for example. So the default reply would be yes. But yes could imply that someone might have checked available vacation days before replying — at least it might look like that when you look back at this decision 6 months from now 😒. The thing someone would really like to reply to this #decision is “I read it and have no objections”. And since that is a little long for a tag, we decided to give this the tag #read. For most decisions, #read makes much more sense than #yes. For the counterpart of such decisions with an implied default, we chose the tag #veto. #Veto clearly jumps out and makes clear that someone does not agree to the implied default reply.
The whole protocol
- Ask for a decision by marking it with the #decision tag. Give enough context. Also imply a default choice by stating it as a decision, not a question.
- Everyone replies with #read, if they have no objection against the decision. If you object the decision, reply with #veto.
- Easily scan or find decisions and replies by searching for the tags.
Final words
This simple protocol can be applied in almost any modern group chat tool. It helps us at Dreimannzelt to keep decision making fast while at the same time mitigate communication mistakes.
Let me know what you think. Did this protocol help your distributed team to improve decision making? I’d ❤️ to hear about it! I also want to offer my support, if you have further questions — just leave a comment or send me a message on twitter.
Cheers!
