Sense-making Decision-Making.
This week’s reflection on decision-making was not easy for me to write and close — its riddled with assumptions, and tangled with cynicism and hope, and then ends on a raw, abrupt note.
My best apology is that it’s in a state of sense-making. Sorry to be sloppy- but here are my thoughts are on why group decisions are tough (and why Loomio felt like a good experience), my beef with the System and the experience of its decision-making environment, why I’ve had it with- but cannot be free of rationality, and what makes group decisions a good elective.
What smells like good decisioning
On our Awa team decision of where to take our city meeting — set in six months time, we are currently somewhere on the map between, ‘somewhere new’ and, ‘your hometown’ — for reasons diverse but stated, and Loomio is the plane that will help us, all of us, arrive happily, and safely.
I was pondering on what Loomio actually does that smells good to all of us on the team, because we have not really come to decision via Loomio, to that stage where we are pleased with the outcome, but yet, it is undeniable that the coming decision smells good, even if we cannot see it yet. For me at least, I think its smelling good, for three, closely-related reasons.
The first thing is, everyone is seated. This is perhaps the prelude to any decisioning: Who is in the room? Who has a voice and stake? Is this an equally distributed/heard voice and stake? Loomio seats everyone at the table- gives them each the same set of decision-making tools, people of diverse shapes and forms (as perceived through the lens of each participant in the decisioning), and this acts as that crucial first attempt at leveling unequal power.
The second thing is, we know where to look. As decentralised decisioning veterans have us know, the ‘warren’ of decisions that present themselves can be ‘messy’, and the details can get lost in the chaos of an intentionally autonomous group. To be rid of the possibility of ‘you snooze you lose’ — when people actually snooze not because they mean to (I think), but because they’ve lost track of the group, Loomio puts in timelines, documents all considerations, and brings back those left behind, so that we have all eyes, on the prize.
The third thing is, we’re in it together. Because everyone is seated with more or less the same capacity for power, and everyone knows where to look — where we’re headed at every step, there is a sense of ownership no matter the group decision type you take. This sense of ownership with togetherness deepens when decisioning becomes drawn out, which is when we need to hear each other better, because the vision, the end goal, isn’t so clear.
So I think this is what Loomio provides for group deliberation. It handles decision, not as an outcome, but a process. Its narrative of decision-making, is verb, not noun. That is what smells so good.
My bias, or my story against the System
So why am I ‘hungry’ for what smells good? The answer is, I’m driven by my story for what doesn’t work: the System in which decisions are made — unconvincing decision logic, ineffective processes, and ultimately, having no personal control.
This is that story.
From my old job-seat in a public service government organisation, group decisions are undertaken to spread responsibility, but in reality, only one or two people hold accountability, and make the decisions after reports plate up the necessary information or proposal. This is the signature of delegated decision-making.
In my experiences as part of the rank and file of this bureaucratic environment, defined in Merriam Webster as an ‘adherence to fixed rules’, a ‘hierarchy of authority’, an ‘administration marked by officialism, red tape… ’, I have had both weak and strong leaders.
Strong leaders do not use their powers of veto, instead they operate on trust, stand behind those who have the lay of the land, even if the risk of failure is present, weighing in as advisors, not as autocrats. They are strong not because they have the power, but because they are in power, to distribute power. They recognise that human capital is not a pure economic unit of input, but a critical and exponential factor in the equation.
It is unnatural for any human being to feel belonged to and motivated by fixed rules, authority, officialism and red tape. Our best collective work does not come no matter how many contracted hours we put in. The minimum work is plated instead.
But some learn to master this system, or inadvertently move into positions of greater responsibility, and power. With power comes decision-making. They don’t forget their feeling of the unnatural- so they re-shape the rules, and structures of the environment to a more palatable nature if they can. They become the updated system, but the system prevails.
Since strong leaders are not a given and working towards assuming decision-making powers entails becoming part of such a system, my bias is then nudging me to ask, What would it be like, to make collaborative decisions in a different sort of organisation? And that is where I am now, end of Week 2 of this inquiry.
My tendencies, or our brain’s operating manual for rationality
But in examining the ‘nuts and bolts’ of self-organised decision-making as someone put it, I find myself returning to the question of, Is there room in decision-making for more than one? Here I am thinking of decision as an outcome, not a process. Why and how do we make decisions individually, that gives us the confidence that we can make equal or better ones as a group?
In a traditional hierarchic workplace, where thinking work dominates but is scattered across a dozen specialised roles, most of us have to undertake decisions whether individually or alone, to solve problems.
Prob•lem | noun | A question raised for inquiry, consideration, or solution. (Also) an intricate unsettled question, a source of perplexity, distress.
Problems in our society are dealt with rationality. Novelist Anne Lamott was quoted to have referred to the rational mind as a ‘golden calf that this culture worships’. In this prevailing culture, the act of deciding, is best done when one understands the facts, and has the data to make an informed choice. An ‘evidence-based’ solution.
But both the information and the logic we apply to make a call — which we call experience, or expertise is based on our understanding of a static past. We map our future, predict scenarios based on history, make decisions with lessons learnt from past failures, because that is what most of us have to work with, except maybe scientists or explorers etc., who study what we know we don’t know.
“We have let our awareness drift from the world around us, to the world that we have made. World of form, world of maps that go from A to B to C. World of milestones and deadlines and endpoints. World of strategy. We’ve forgotten how to be aware of sensory data of many of the dimensions of life.”
-Marti Spiegelman, Innsaei (2016).
For the rest of us, we operate on how we know the world to be, which is ultimately a view from the past, and less with what is arising and alive. Even when we find out that we are secretly using our ‘intuition’ and rationalising it by cherry picking the facts, that ‘intuition’ is an inner knowing that is hardwired by our consciousness of the past.
An opportunity for empathy
Industrial designer and gerontologist Patricia Moore said, that empathy is a constant awareness of the fact that your concerns are not everyone’s concerns and that your needs are not everyone’s needs and that some compromise has to be achieved moment by moment.
If my bias is misguided and proves an unreliable position, and if our tendencies to make rational decisions cannot be tempered enough by intuition of the world -outside of our past, then perhaps group decisions are a great idea if not for anything, but the much needed exercise of our instinct for empathy. In short, let’s work together as a practice of empathy.
Decision-making makes the thread that clothes all our relationships. Even if the formula of our best decisions can never be repeated, I think I owe it to ourselves, for that ‘adult learner’, for the ‘deeper psychological stuff that gets offered up’, to make each decisioning (verb) mean something to us.
