Have you ever found yourself trying to get many people in different departments or on your project team to all agree to something, or to try to come to consensus on a critical decision by committee? It can be like herding cats across a wide field into a fenced-in area at the back, if you don’t watch out. Especially if there are several issues of varying importance to the participants and differing personalities and needs.
Imagine you and your co-worker have discovered an opportunity for innovation on a system in your department. Your conversation starts out with similar excitement and passion about the idea and then rapidly deteriorates to two completely different pictures of what you each want and how to get there. You each start trying to convince the other of your picture and asking the other to concede on aspects of their proposal. Then, a sense of degradation around your relationship begins because “they don’t understand,” “their idea won’t work” and you don’t feel they are listening. Both sides start to feel disappointment and distrust.
It often falls apart quickly because of the process, not because of the challenging topics or people involved. Effective decision-making requires a process that takes into account the complexity and number of issues you face, satisfies a large number of parties, is efficient, and does not produce lowest-common-denominator results. The process highlighted above, however, focuses on pressure to give up what’s important and chipping away at the best vision into a suboptimal idea. It is unclear how many concessions will be requested as each party becomes more wed to their idea rather than conceding. The time to decision gets elongated.
What if you had a straightforward process that took into account multiple parties with very different interests and shortened the time to decision?
Here are recommended steps to coming to agreement when many are chiming in:
1) Share ground rules for the process and how it will work with all parties.
2) Start with a single page and at a brainstorming meeting or through a group email or message board, ask all parties to tell you what each one wants and what is important to them with regard to the outcome.
3) Record and collect all of their interests no matter how farfetched or far apart.
4) Once you have heard from everyone, take the list of interests and analyze them, looking for commonalities and possible solutions that take into account as much of what is important as possible , trying to include aspects from everyone.
5) Once you have a rough draft of a solution, send the draft back out to the participants and ask one simple question: What is wrong with this from your perspective?
Yes, you are asking them to criticize what you have just drafted. People tend to be able to tell you fairly easily what is wrong with something. And guess what? Now they are pointing at the document, not each other. And by using only “one-text”, you minimize confusion with too many circulating drafts, and one person maintains the coordination to keep the process moving smoothly.
6) Repeat this request for comment and criticism for several rounds, each time improving the draft, until finally it seems you cannot improve the solution any more.
7) Present the final draft with one question, “Will you commit to this, yes or no?”
As an example of where this process has worked with large numbers of people involved, there was a situation in San Ramon, CA where a manufacturing site that had fallen out of use was in contention among every major interest group in the community, and consensus was built with 55 parties.
This works well when there is a history of tense relations. When President Carter used this process at Camp David to strike the agreement between Egypt and Israel over the Sinai, it took 23 drafts and they reached accord. This was a critical and complex agreement between two nations and so it was on the high side for amount of critique rounds. Our experience is that it usually takes only 5-7 drafts, sometimes less, to find a solid solution.
Following these steps is valuable for a quick and efficient process when it usually takes years. In Austin, Texas, two unions needed a merger in eight weeks and in upstate New York, union and management teams had been working on a contract for a year and had one week to settle it. In both cases, this process accomplished it.
As for who is best to be the “architect” coordinator and drafter of this process, a neutral facilitator is a good option, especially if this is a new process and there is a low level of trust. As an individual drafter, it is important to hold the document “at arm’s length” when taking in the critiques. If there are good working relationships between the parties, good writers, and people on both sides who understand the process, subcommittees can be formed to work on it. The subcommittees would have a very specific role – to serve up drafts for criticism. They have no power to commit in the subcommittee room; and only the whole group can commit.
So when you find yourself swirling in too many proposals, lots of people weighing in, and you want to efficiently get to a consensus, reign them in with this “one-text” process for fast and diplomatic results.
