It was a moment of weakness.

I was facilitating a client meeting, trying to get the group to a consensus. I asked everyone to suggest key points or insights the solution should be cognizant of, and wrote each point on a flip chart.

One participant had a point, and he made it. Over and over and over again.

I paused the discussion, and in place of a bullet marker I wrote a number next to each point on the flip chart, instructing everyone that, to save time, if they wanted to make a point that was already on the flip chart they should just speak the point’s number.

The next time the participant in question started to make his point again I interrupted him. “9?” I asked. When he continued, I wrote “9” on the flip chart and asked for any additional thoughts that needed inclusion.

As a counterpoint, in one of his essays Richard Feynman wrote, “It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best—summing it all up—without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.”

Which brings me, briefly, to this week’s dilemma: The most important event of the week was, without a doubt, Donald Trump’s indictment. Given its importance, and that events involving current or former POTUSes often lead to more broadly applicable leadership insights, a part of me figures I ought to be applying the KJR treatment to the situation.

But then I tried to come up with anything I might say that hasn’t been said by at least a dozen professional opinionators, not to mention the Internet commentariat echo chambers.

I didn’t succeed. So please accept my apologies for not covering the story here. But I promise you this: If you bring up your browser and type “Trump indicted” in the search box, you’ll find everything I might possibly have written somewhere on the list.

Advanced Placement Exercise: Do this same with ChapGPT.

Speaking of repetition, this just in, from McKinsey & Company: “For IT to become a real driver of value, both business and IT must work together as partners according to McKinsey’s Oliver Bossert and Björn Münstermann.”

Let the ridicule begin, starting with an observation: Saying that both business and IT must work together as partners suggests it’s possible for only one or the other to work together as partners. Or, as they might have said, “Either the business or IT must work together as partners.”

Let’s agree to forgive this lapse. On to the next one: The sub-head in McKinsey’s emailed synopsis adds this wisdom: “Treat IT as strategic capability.”

It’s advice that might have been valuable had it been offered a decade ago, when “digital” first started to become a noun, and mainstream business leaders started paying attention to IT beyond its traditional role as scapegoat and necessary organizational evil.

Oh, wait. Treating IT as a strategic capability was offered as advice back then. Were McKinsey’s scholars serious about all this they might have read Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21^st Century Information Technology, which offered similar insights in 2009, or There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project, which covered this territory more thoroughly four years ago.

But here in the KJR institute our goal is to offer useful advice, not just to whine about McKinsey & Company taking credit for our good work. So here’s some advice you can use: Forward the McKinsey & Company essay to your company’s executives and point out that, thanks to your visionary thinking, your company is years ahead of the industry.

Bob’s last word: Speaking of what we won’t whine about here: Gartner has, following its usual pattern, introduced a new catch-phrase so as to claim ownership of what many of us have advised for decades. The new catch-phrase is “citizen developer,” which Gartner defines as “An employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units.”

Gartner’s advice: IT should support citizen developers.

KJR’s advice: As a steadfast KJR subscriber you’ve already been taking this advice for the past 20 years or so (for example, “Preventing value prevention,” InfoWorld, 1/20/2003; or search KJR for “shadow IT” or “Value Prevention Society”).

Now available on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide:“4 hard truths of multivendor outsourcing.” Of every aspect of managing an IT organization, outsourcing probably has the worst book smarts to street smarts ratio. Here are some street smarts to help you along.

Decisions commit or deny staffing, time, and money. Anything else is just talking.

We’ve been talking about how organizations should make decisions in the context of governance-oriented decisions (“Who signed the Declaration of Independence?,” 2/20/2023, and “The fourth law,” 2/27/2023).

The conclusion: businesses should forgo the temptation to form steering committees … bodies whose members are responsible for representing their organizations to the committee at large. They should, instead, charter councils … organizations composed of members who bring to the council special focus and expertise on one or more business functions, but who think of themselves as leaders of the whole business.

In the world of Agile, governance, such as it is, is embodied in the product owner. And establishing a product owner does, in fact, contribute to agility: When one person has full authority to make governance-level decisions, the only impediment to making decisions is the product owner’s timidity.

This is a special case of the broader view of decision-making. Those responsible for governing (that is, governance), and beyond that those responsible for any kind of decision have five ways to make decisions:

Consensus: We all agree to it, even if we don’t all agree with it.

Consultation: Everyone with a stake in the decision shares their knowledge with the decision-maker and then trusts the decision-maker’s decision.

Authoritarianism: The decision-maker makes the decision and announces it.

Voting: There’s safety in numbers, so let’s just tally them. Nobody can blame the decision-maker for the wisdom of crowds.

Delegation: Turn the decision over to someone else and ask them to make it using one of the remaining four ways to make a decision. It’s the remaining four because delegated decisions shouldn’t be re-gifted.

These are, to be clear, decision-making styles, not decision-making processes. Continuing with the Agile example, the product owner in Agile development has full authority to make decisions the etymologically obvious authoritarian way.

But authority doesn’t constitute obligation. Wise product owners, like most other leaders, make consultative decision-making their mainstay, except for this: With non-governance-oriented decisions, consultative decision-making amounts to listening to a lot of people in order to become smarter about the subject, then making the decision.

Non-governance-oriented decisions are, that is, unstructured.

But when it comes to governance, decision-making should be structured and rule-oriented. This is true whether the subject is Agile’s product ownership, an EPMO’s (that’s “enterprise program management office”) responsibility for grooming the company’s project portfolio, or compliance-related reporting and assessment.

When it comes to governance, that is, consistency is essential. Without it, everyone who has to deal with the governance function will figure the game is rigged, and finding bypasses and workarounds is a better path to success than trying to minimize the second-degree burns to be inflicted by the function’s flaming hoops.

Bob’s last word: Read between the lines and you’ll find an unfortunate fact of life: Entrepreneurship doesn’t scale.

In a typical entrepreneurship, governance and the owner’s whims are, if not synonymous, pretty close to it. In the entrepreneur’s eyes, success comes from basing all of their decisions, starting with deciding to open their metaphorical doors for business and moving on from there, on their experience, smarts, and good judgment.

But beyond a certain size, the balance has to shift away from pure entrepreneurship to a more organized form of governance. It’s a transition many entrepreneurs bemoan as the organization becoming a bureaucracy.

But without this transition, employees stop admiring the entrepreneur’s vision and become, instead, leery of their arbitrariness.

The essence of bureaucracy, that is, isn’t sand in the gears of innovation, although that is often an unfortunate side-effect. With attention and care, the worst bureaucracy has to offer can be, to some extent, averted.

What it takes is to constantly remember that the essence of bureaucracy is enforced consistency. It might not be likable, but it’s often essential.

Bob’s sales pitch: I’m always in search of more subscribers. But KJR’s subject matter isn’t the sort of thing I can promote on social media. Or if it is, I haven’t found the magic formula.

The closest I have are subscribers recommending KJR to friends and colleagues who should be subscribers.

I presume the message is clear.