Widening our gaze in decision-making
Who decides how to decide?
How does a group arrive at their decision-making structures?
These were the questions posed by our decision-making week of this wonderful Practical Self-Management intensive. Increasingly, I feel clear that there is no moment of arrival, no just and democratic process to decide how to decide. There is a non-linear journey, of making better decisions together in better ways, of group change and growth. We enter into messy, scattered processes together, with the potential to find cohesion and clarity over time.
I have been in groups where over time, our decision-making processes have not only gotten more efficient but have generally become more representative of the collective will. I’ve been in groups where over time, our decision-making processes have widened their awareness or gaze and have better called in that which is not immediately visible to reflect the social contexts we were operating in. And I’ve been in groups where over time, our decision-making processes have totally stagnated, with the same group dynamics and the same structures and glacier-like culture change for years at a time.
Reflecting on these experiences, and the resources on decision-making from the course, decision-making processes are given much more room to improve in contexts with strong feedback or listening systems. And the quality that often allows those systems to thrive is when each individual in the system is grounded. Being grounded allows us to be bold, to speak up and share feedback. Being grounded allows us to be receptive, to listen to the feedback around us coming from others and our environment. Being grounded allows us to be aware, to know what we have to say and what we can contribute to a group.
By then having feedback and listening systems, over time, the decision-making cultures and structures can shift towards what the group needs and take into account the challenges with the model at any single point in time. By listening to feedback, I include not just what is vocalized or shared explicitly, but a practice of paying attention to the environment and patterns that are much more indirect. Part of the feedback is felt through how energized and participatory the decision-making processes are in practice.
A theme that recurs in writings about PSM decision-making is about building trust over time. We must ask, as we make more decisions, who is trust being built up with? Is it being built up with the whole collective, your coworkers and comrades? What about the whole living systems? Are the decisions you make building trust with the Earth, and with those who are not within the scope of your process? If you are building a new office space for your organization, you might consider not only the needs and will of your team, but those of your customers, the general public, your new neighbours, the Indigenous peoples of the new region you are moving to, the impact you may have on the rent prices in the area, and the impact of your organization’s expansion on the economy.
When we make decisions, we must also ask: who do our decisions represent? Do they represent just the organization and its members, or a wider interconnected system? Instead of only developing tools to help an organization fulfill its self-given mandate, how can we build structures of accountability to wider systems and contexts into our decision-making processes? How can we move towards systemic autonomy and liberation, rather than just organizational, in how we design our decision-making structures?
Part of learning to listen to the feedback around us holistically is about humility. Practical self-management includes working out loud, which can also allow for feedback to come in. Though even when working out loud, we must humble ourselves to material limitations. For example, Erik Torenberg is a venture capitalist who shares his thoughts out loud on Twitter, often deeply entrenched in neoliberalism, and he frequently invites feedback in his replies though from my perspective he rarely receives substantive, rigorous rebuttal. Recently, I saw the following tweet from his account.
From my vantage, his third note, “Someone will correct” your wrong hunches is as common a belief in the ‘thinking out loud’ Twittersphere as it is disingenuous and inaccurate. We can never assume that just because we asked for feedback, even if we asked publicly, that now our ideas are sufficiently challenged and corrected, and that we have received all the feedback that we need. Some folks won’t see our asks. Some folks are too tired to share feedback. Some folks don’t give feedback for free. Some folks are unable to communicate. And by humbling ourselves to this reality, listening to what lies in the feedback that we have not explicitly received is part of the feedback we have received. This is all not to say we cannot move ahead with a decision without all this feedback, but just to bring into our awareness that none of us have all the answers, even after collecting feedback.
A final question I’m holding in all this: how can different systems of decision-making relate to each other? Each of us are in a different location in the galaxy of constellations that make up our decision-making habits, holding different decision-making practices, cultures, levels of experience and levels of knowledge. From this understanding, I have been thinking about the relationship of an organized decision-making structure to those who are not yet part of it, and in particular to those who are not yet part of any explicitly intentional decision-making practice. What does a sound invitation look like, one that is aware of both the unique background and the practices held by the invitee? How can a decision-making system humble itself to the existence of others, and the inevitable need to relate to those other systems? How can we each humble ourselves to the expansive galaxy of decision-making practice, to bring into awareness that our local habits and constellations exist in a galactic scale context?
For practice in widening awareness, I have been returning again and again to Kailea Sonrisa’s “An Exercise in Widening Your Gaze as an Act of Making Meaning” writings, through her Earth is ‘Ohana platform. This is also where I heard the language of “widening your gaze”.
