One more re-run – a piece that completes some of the thinking in last week’s re-run. I think you’ll find it’s worth your time. Also the time of colleagues who don’t yet know about KJR. (Was that a strong enough hint?)

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As I get older, science fiction seems to have less science, which is too bad. Science is the hard work of figuring out how the universe works. It’s been replaced with swords and sorcery, which is simply wishful thinking, and as David Brin has pointed out, part of “wishful” is the assumption that in a feudal society you’d end up as something other than one of the peons who made up 90% of the population.

And so, while I wait for the next Discworld novel to appear each year, I’ve been reading more history. Regrettably, not quite enough, as several subscribers pointed out in response to last week’s column: Well before the Revolutionary War, England largely rejected the idea of the divine right of kings, replacing it with the inherent right of the aristocracy. Not that this was much better, nor do I know whether the English of the time claimed God wanted those with titles to be entitled.

People being what they are, I’d bet that they did.

Much of the rest of my correspondence had to do with the role of consensus in corporate decision-making. One source told me that a number of large corporations teach decision-making in their leadership training programs. Their programs (which, unlike the leadership seminars we provide, apparently require lexicographical activism) define both consensus and collaboration as conflict resolution processes, and then explain that consensus is bad while collaboration is good.

And if I define black as a shade of lavender, and white as a shade of tan, I can easily make the case that white suits make a better fashion statement for male business executives than black ones. “Collaborate” is widely understood (and defined in dictionaries) to refer to all situations in which people work together in a cooperative fashion. It’s a process. Not only is it not limited to conflict resolution, but it’s unlikely to resolve serious conflicts, since serious conflicts generally arise when people lose their ability to cooperate.

Consensus isn’t a process. It’s a result — general agreement, or more formally, a state of being in which everyone involved agrees to support a decision, regardless of what they personally would consider to have been ideal. The best consensus decisions start with collaboration, but collaboration isn’t required.

What is required is a shared desire to find some way to move forward.

Consensus isn’t the only way to make business decisions. It isn’t suited to all situations, or even most situations. It’s time-consuming, and is in consequence expensive. For engineering situations it’s risky, because the process of compromise required for consensus easily leads to design inconsistencies, and those, in turn, lead to kludges, deep in the heart of the architecture.

Use consensus when what matters, more than anything else, is buy-in — commitment to the course of action chosen by the organization. Use other methods for other circumstances.

Take product design as an example. A very good way to design products is to put a product manager in charge of a small team, consisting of experts from marketing, design, engineering, manufacturing, and cost-accounting. This gives you your best shot at creating a well-built product that’s easy to manufacture and appealing to customers.

Except that it’s never that easy. The most marketable product might be hard to manufacture. The best engineering might have too little market appeal, or be too hard to manufacture as well. What’s easiest to manufacture could require the elimination of highly desirable product features.

And what everyone else wants to build might end up costing too much, thinning margins to unacceptable levels.

Every member of the design team will have to make … that’s right … compromises. Which means that with all the best of intentions, your attempt to avoid the expense of consensus has simply shifted the responsibility for arriving at consensus to a different group of people. You don’t seriously think that having everyone make their case to the product manager, who then makes all of the decisions, will work, do you?

So here’s your guideline when it comes to design decisions of any kind: Unless one person knows enough to design the entire entity, whatever it is, charter a design team. Keep it small — no more than five people; three is better. Choose people who already know and trust each other’s judgment. Failing that, choose people who you know can work well with others.

Who can, that is, collaborate to arrive at consensus.

I took the weekend off. While this week’s piece is a fourteen-year-old re-run, I don’t think it’s showing its age very much.

Although I very much wish it was.

– Bob

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The Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States — our two most important founding documents — are remarkably secular. Rebukes to English governance, which claimed its legitimacy from God through the divine right of kings, they state with complete clarity that the legitimacy of governments is obtained, not from Heaven, but from the consent of the governed.

The words are clear and accessible to anyone who is at all literate and has the patience to read them. That this was the consensus of this nation’s founders is not in serious doubt.

Also not in serious doubt is the respect our nation’s founders had for consensus itself, perhaps because it is the purest form of the governed’s consent. In each case they spent a very long time discussing and debating what they should think and how that thinking should be expressed; also in each case, different factions compromised to reach the final decisions. Both documents were results with which each group and faction might not completely agree, but to which they could and did completely commit.

It’s become popular to consider the Constitution’s framers as selfish, wealthy, racist landowners interested solely in preserving their status. But this oversimplifies the complexity of their circumstances. When they led the Revolutionary War, they had quite literally risked their lives and fortunes to gain independence from England. Their sincerity of purpose in creating a resilient nation seems more likely than otherwise.

As for slavery, it is beyond doubt that many of the framers abhorred it (many with more moral courage than, for example, Jefferson, who abhorred slavery in principle but not so strongly as to suffer the personal inconveniences to be experienced from its elimination). The Constitution’s allowance of slavery demonstrates the nature of consensus better than any of its other features: Even those who hated it the most valued preservation of the nation even more. They understood, perfectly, the need to give way on some points — even those held very strongly — to achieve the larger result.

Consensus is falling out of fashion in leadership circles these days, and we’re the poorer for it. Three reasons seem to dominate this shift, all the result of too-limited understanding of the subject:

• Wrong definition: Consensus is the form of decision-making in which a group might not fully agree with the final decision, but does commit to the final decision specifically because it is the decision of the group. It is not what some detractors call consensus — a process in which a group argues until it gives lip service to a decision which those who approve adhere to and those who don’t feel free to ignore.
• Wrong priority: Achieving consensus is not a quick process. To those who participated, the Constitutional Convention seemed eternal; it did, in fact, require almost four months.Consensus is the wrong process to be used when speed is essential. Conversely, speed is sometimes the wrong priority for leaders to choose — there are many times when commitment is more important than velocity. In business, excessive speed can lead to undesirable results, among them “leaders” who leave those who are supposed to be following too far behind them; and leaders able to win every battle while fighting the wrong war.Metaphorically speaking.
• Wrong technique: Voting is the process where everyone argues, and then tallies up preferences so that the majority wins and the rest lose. Consensus requires an expectation that everyone involved has to give way on some points. It also requires that all concerned do more than allow others to speak while they formulate their rebuttals. It requires actual listening — working to understand the other person’s point of view. That, in turn requires patience, an art practiced extensively by those who participated in our nation’s founding, as the prevalent style of speaking at the time was both windier and more formal than what we practice today.

In general, consensus results in more commitment, but to a relatively poor quality result. Because consensus requires compromise, this generality can’t be entirely avoided. But listening — recognizing that others have wisdom as well — can offset the effects of compromise, making the final result better than what any single individual can achieve.

It’s been said that no committee ever painted the Mona Lisa. That is, of course, true. It’s also true, though, that it was a committee that wrote the Constitution of the United States — a document that is, in its own way, as much a work of art as anything ever created.