Week 2: “Decision Making: Let’s not rush and let it Ripen”
The second week was very insightful. A lot of new ideas and full of “Aha Moments”. If I had to choose one thing, as I did last week when I highlighted “Making the Implicit, Explicit” , I would say this week it was the concept of “Ripeness” and what it really meant in Self Managed Organisations.
So far my experience with the concept “Ripeness” was mainly linked to fruits and veggies (ie By the end of the season, and unless our apples have ripened, we won’t harvest) and relates to the quality of being ready to be collected or eaten. And with the team this week I learned another way of looking at the concept, as we approached ripeness more from an angle of a “quality of being fully developed’.
This week was all about Decision Making in Self Managed Organisations, and we explored different types of decisions, we did a group generative consent decision making on Monday, during the week with the group we launched a Loomio consent process, and we were also exposed to super insightful content and resources about the topic.
“Quality of being fully developed”
Today everything is agile. If you are not agile, or in a journey to it, people look at you as if you were from another planet. With the speed and advancement of digital technologies, there is almost an implicit requirement for us all to be agile… to think agile…to network agile.. to date agile … and also to make agile decisions.
The problem with being “always agile” when making decisions, because we want to have a decision as soon as possible, is that we could be faced with some of the following issues:
- No one knows how are we making the decision
- Someone ends up making an autocratic decision
- We miss to involve relevant people
- We miss to consider relevant information
- etc…
I am sure that you have experienced some/all of the above described issues. At the end of the day when we don’t take the time to stop to reflect on the real problem/need/question that needs addressing, and more importantly, on how do we want to make the decision, we (almost) always end up wasting time. Our time, our teams and our organisation’s valuable time. The whole process of agreeing on something, even if it’s a little thing, it becomes chaotic and you end up never making a decision.
“We are always making decisions”
Manuel Küblböck from Gini shares a great quote on his blog
“Decision-making is a — if not the — core discipline of any organisation”
And after reflecting during the week, and also thinking about my personal work experience so far, I couldn’t agree more with him. The only thing we do when we go to work is to make decisions. Big and small decisions. Short term and long term decisions. We are always making decisions at work and after this week I reconfirm that we have massive opportunity to reexamine the way we approach our decision making practices in our organisations.
In my opinion, the first step in this reexamination would be to slow down a bit when it comes to decision making. When I suggest we slow down, what I really mean is that we should take some time to:
- First of all, define which is the problem you are trying to solve?, question you are trying to respond? or decision you are trying to make?
- Spend some time with your team, and people affected by the decision, deciding, based on the problem you need to solve, how do we want to decide?
- As Manuel Küblböck again rightly mentioned, try to focus more on the long term and sustained behavioural change rather than “I need to make a decision as soon as possible”. The whole point here is that if you spend enough time consulting with others before you make a decision, and not just trying to push or sell your idea quickly, you will have a lot more options of impacting positive change in the long term. It might take you a bit longer when you start, but it will definitely be a more sustainable decision.
“Let’s put some of these ideas into practice”
One of the nicest, and more useful, things that can happen when you are learning new skills or behaviours, is to have the opportunity to practice those skills as soon as you start learning them. In my particular case this week I was very lucky :)
As I was learning more about decision making types, advice process and generative decision making, I was invited to help one of the teams in my company to do a bit of organisational design. The purpose of the initiative was to explore and decide if it was a good thing (for the people, the team, and the organisation) to merge 2 teams that today don’t work together as much as they could. The teams are planning to organise a workshop in 1 week time to explore the proposal for the first time and hopefully make a decision that will allow them to move forward.
The first thing I did was to spend some time with the person who is kind of taking the initiative of organising the workshop to explore first how shared and agreed was the idea of merging the 2 teams between the impacted people, and second, to explore how they were making these types of decisions in the past as a team.
After that conversation, I understood more about the proposal they wanted to explore and move forward, and I realised that the decision they wanted to make was, based on Samantha’s Slades ideas, a “High Risk / High Duration” one.
High Risk: As it will involve not just the people from the 2 teams, but also how they interact with the rest of the teams in the company. This will potentially also impact the quality of the end products we put in front of our customers and communities
Longevity/Difficulty: This is the first time these teams get a bit more serious about doing this, so I would expect a decision like this will be a long term one. Not easily reversible. Also, it will be difficult as we will be asking people to change current ways of working which is always challenging.
By then, it was clear to me that we needed to take a more collective approach to decision making, but I didn’t want to impose or decide myself before sharing some other options with the team.
Last Wednesday, the team organised a session to continue preparing the workshop agenda, and I had the opportunity of joining them. At some point during the conversation I introduced them to this
“If we want to make the right decision for all of us, shall we spend some time deciding how do we want to make the decision?”
To support that conversation and exploration, I shared with them some decision making types, and then we did a “zoom in” on the benefits and pitfalls of Democratic, Consent and Consensus. I used the slide below as visual support during the session.
After some discussion and questions, the team showed some initial interest in trying for the first time a Consent Based option. I must confess that I was kind of happy by then :)
What’s next? I am currently working on a pre read document that I will be sharing with the team in the coming days. In this document I will present to them in more details the 7 step “Generative Decision Making Process” (Samantha Slade) that was presented to us during the week and we will see how the workshop goes. I am also planning to prepare my role as Host using this very good article
Am I biased?
One of the guiding questions of this week assignment was to explore if we have any biases when making decisions. And I kind of thought a lot about it during the week. I must confess that I am a bit, or maybe a lot, biased with the decision making types that were presented to us this week.
To try to understand my biases, and its nature, I also did some reflection on “Why I thought I was biased?”. And I think that I managed to get more clarity on a few ideas:
- My past experiences: I have been working now almost 13 years, and so far I’ve been exposed a lot to “not so human and/or effective “ decision making types such as Dictatorial, Delegated or Decentralised. I have also seen a lot of attempts to have Unanimity in teams, but very rarely I have seen it work.
- My beliefs about people: I once read the book “Brave New Work” written by Aaron Dignan (The Ready) and in there he spoke about being “People Positive”. This was all about trusting people to do the right thing, that people are naturally motivated and capable to self direct, and that they ultimately want to do their best. And I personally tend to lean on and believe on these kinds of assumptions when I interact with people, especially at work, in which I currently have a People and Culture (Human Resources) role.
- We can have a better future (or better futures): In one of the paragraphs above I mentioned that I fully believe we have a massive opportunity of improving the way we make decisions at work, and after this week I reconfirmed that there are more collective, inclusive, effective and human practices out there for us to tap into, like consent or the advice process.
So, yes. I am a bit biased, I am also aware of it, and really looking forward to what’s coming if I manage to keep slowing down before making decisions and waiting for that ripeness to evolve and develop.
This is all from my side this week team… I hope you enjoyed my reflections and looking forward to reading yours :)
