Consensus vs Collaboration vs Consent

Nothing is what happens when everyone has to agree : Seth Godin

I wanted to set the tone of this post by quoting Seth Godin. I like the quote and I don’t think anyone would challenge that in principle. But what most of us don’t know is how to make progress in situations of disagreements. Do you use power and control to bull doze your opinion for the sake of making progress? I have been thinking over this topic a lot lately since I often myself in situations where decisions get stuck in a limbo in the absence of clear consensus. This is a classical problem especially in flatter organization where a room full of highly opinionated individuals find themselves in a deadlock and a lot of time and energy is spent in assuaging their concerns leading to no decisions and no action. In this part of the world (Europe) I have found that management decisions are challenged more often than say in a large US based organization. And I appreciate this culture of empowerment and openness to challenge decisions from the higher ups. However, I also realize that allowing every decision to be taken by consensus is recipe for disaster, especially when the organization is growing. Lack of agility and swiftness of decision making can impair the success of the organization. This post is my attempt to find solutions to this problem gathering insights from different sources.

What does Jeff Bezos say about high-velocity decision making?

Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders last year was a quick refresher course on key management principles. I urge you all to read and imbibe it in your organisation. However, I would like to focus on what Jeff said on the topic of high-velocity decision making. Let me share what Jeff said verbatim:

To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business — plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.

First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process.

Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

I shared the idea of disagree and commit in a team setting sometime back and was visibly pleased that within a week a team member used the phrase, “I disagree and commit” on an issue he was not supportive of.

What does Marty Cagan say about consensus-based decision making?

Marty Cagan wrote elaborately on this topic. Here is what he wrote on his post:

Many companies pride themselves on being a “consensus culture.” And of course if I had the choice between everybody on the team excited and supportive of something versus not having everyone excited and supportive, holding everything else constant, I would certainly rather have everyone on board.

However, in practice that is not the choice I find. In consensus cultures people are rarely excited or supportive. Mostly because they are very frustrated at how slow things move, how risk-averse the company is, how hard it is to make a decision, and especially how unimpressive the products are.

In my experience, the leaders in these consensus culture companies usually have their hearts in the right place, and they are working hard to create a culture of inclusiveness, where people feel heard, and teams work together towards a greater good. They don’t understand how this worked so well when they were a small startup, and they have tried so hard to retain this culture as they grew, and they are reluctant to let go of this key aspect of their corporate identity.

My view is that these companies are confusing consensus with collaboration.

While consensus is a nice to have, we absolutely need collaboration. Great products are a fusion of customer value or functionality, usability and design, and technology. We must work together closely to come up with solutions that satisfy all three of these dimensions.

Even within the core team (product manager, lead designer, lead engineer), they should absolutely strive for agreement on key decisions, but it’s still not consensus. Each has their area of decision authority, but when there are trade-offs among the areas, the product manager is the person ultimately responsible for the call.

In my experience, if people don’t feel like they can be heard by the product team when they believe they have something to say, that’s a real problem. However, as long as people feel heard, they understand that they won’t always agree with the decisions, and further they understand that there may be other considerations beyond what they can see.

Alignment doesn’t Need Agreement

Sometime ago, I read a well articulated post by Tim Herbig titled “Alignment doesn’t need agreement”. Tim shared the graphic below that explains Jeff Bezos’ idea of disagree and commit . As the graphic shows, you may not be happy with the decision but you commit to it for the greater good of the team and the organization.

Picture credit: Tim Herbig

Consent vs Consensus

Last week I heard of the term consent vs consensus by a visiting Agile coach and it got me curious. I never knew before that there was indeed a difference between consent and consensus. I looked up on the Internet and found this:

Using the Principle of Consent, members don’t “block” decisions. If they cannot accept the proposed action, they state their objections with reasons that can be understood by other members of the circle. The role of the circle is to listen with the intent to understand those reasons and to adapt the proposal to minimize the risks. Members do not waste time debating or trying to persuade other members to minimize their objections.

Consent means there are no significant objections on a topic. Consent does not require agreement, affirmation or even preference. Consent is reached when no one is aware of a risk that we can’t afford to take.

Instead of needing everyone to agree on the perfect solution for the foreseeable future (which is pretty unrealistic when you think about it), consent allows the organization to find a “good enough” solution to move forward, knowing they will learn and adjust as they go.

So much efficiency is lost when people believe they always need to make decisions together. Instead, it is recommended to have consent as the basis for decisions in special high stake meetings.

We consent on high stake decisions, and empower individuals to make day-to-day, operational decisions with a level of autonomy to get the job done. Clear delegation frees people from feeling they always need to make decisions together.

Collaboration trumps Consensus

Around two years ago, I had a short conversation with Robert Huber, a veteran product leader where he explained why collaboration trumps consensus. Here’s the recorded conversation:

Please let me know if you have other methods and techniques to solve this challenge in your organization.