Who’s The Boss When Making Decisions

At my startup, Jaswig, we chose for a distributed leadership culture to function mare like a starfish vs. a spider. We all believe in running a business differently, but are encountering unexpected difficulties with that, and the biggest challenge is:

HOW do we make decisions if there is no “leader”?

We’ve currently made all our decisions based on democratic (as best as possible) discussions to come towards a consensus. Although good because everyone is involved, we are feeling it is a very slow process, and doesn’t always end up with a long-lasting decision.

Other startups with similar issues, or with solutions to this issue, please reach out to me! I would like to run an experiment on you and hope to help us all move forward faster :)

I’ve put my Biomimicry hat on to get some advice from my mentor Nature, and searched on scholar.google.com for “group decision making in animals”

The first hit was exactly what I was looking for, and a Nature paper should be good, so I choose that one to read first.

The paper is concise and left me with a clear message. According to the article there are two extreme mechanisms whereby a social group of non-human animals can make a group decision:
(1) despotically, where one dominant decides
(2) democratically, where a majority of group members decides

Which mechanism is deployed usually depends on the overall cost to the group, which is the sum of all individual synchronization costs (the cost of compromising your own preferred decision).

These synchronization costs are usually higher for despotic than for democratic decisions [democracy wins]. However, a despot should not invest more energy than it can gain from despotism and subordinates should not invest more energy in resisting a despot than they can gain from a democratic decision.

Interestingly, if synchronization costs are asymmetric (meaning that one decision is more costly than another; e.g. receiving the responsibility over customer service vs. giving it to outside contractors → this will have more impact to someone who is running the website than to someone who is responsible for production), the decision should not be based on a 50% majority, but on a proportion of members that depends on the degree of asymmetry costs, e.g. two-thirds.

The distribution of synchronization costs between group members depends on how homogeneous members are. One reason why there might be heterogeneity amongst a group is when some individuals have incomplete information/knowledge about the topic. So in this occasion, the most experienced member might better lead the decision-making.

However, according to the mathematical model in the paper, this is only better if the ‘inexperienced’ would make large errors, group size is small, and the difference in experience between leader and ordinary group members is so large that the leader’s average error is lower than the average median error of all other group members.

The paper included some interesting decision making examples from nature.

In a group of Hamadryas baboons the majority of everyone is the deciding factor when it’s about which activity the group will do next, but when it comes to deciding the direction to move it’s only the majority of males that count.

But women don’t despair; males definitely don’t always have the power in non-human animals. In African elephants and buffaloes decision-making is done through the majority of female adults. While often only adults are involved in decision making in democratic groups, the Howler monkey and Guinea baboons include everyone.

Examples of despotic social animal groups are found in meerkats, wolves, and male gorillas. The group has to follow the will of the leader, and they usually accept this as they know it’s the best for the group’s survival.

Please reach out if you feel that your startup is also experiencing challenges during decision-making, I’d love to talk with you about it!