When You Need Consensus, Stick Out Those Thumbs

Not every organizational decision needs to be made by consensus. Plenty of things are best handled by a senior executive or two making a rapid determination. But major shifts or cultural change typically require a lot of people to carry out new tasks in new ways and to think differently; these are things that are much easier accomplished when there’s widespread agreement on the shift.

A sophisticated decisionmaking device

As I wrote in posts about my work with a public media organization developing a digital media strategy, making a big shift usually means guiding a key group of people through decision points and action while planning projects—projects that allow them to learn by acting in new ways well before the process is complete.

Well, I did skip one critical problem: Passing through those decision points can be hard. Really hard. Getting certain groups of people to decide what to do—by building consensus among them—can be about as easy as corralling a bunch of feral cats.

For many people, consensus means getting everyone (or nearly everyone) to agree on the best course of action. In my experience, this is a recipe for failure. This kind of consensus often a) leads to a generalized and watered down conclusion, b) creates a more ambitious conclusion that lots of people say they agree with usually to please a senior manager, or c) leads to no true conclusion at all.

OK, you may ask, then how would you suggest we make decisions by consensus?

My answer: It’s all in the thumbs.

Let me explain what I mean. Take the example of the group of people I worked with at the public media organization. At multiple times during the process of developing their digital strategy, I suggested a course of action. Then I asked each of them to hold up one hand and do one of three things:

• Put their thumb up, if they agreed 
• Put their thumb in the middle, if they had some reservations but could live with it 
• Put their thumb down, if they just couldn’t live with it 

While I wanted consensus decisionmaking in that group, I wasn’t looking for perfect agreement. But I was trying to make sure that every participant—whether from the news, programming, administration, or development departments—could live with the results. So in the world of the thumbs, consensus meant that we had a clear majority with thumbs up, and the remainder thumbs middle. No thumbs down. Seeing thumbs down invariably meant there was some major issue that hadn’t been addressed, and chances are it was an issue shared by multiple members of the group.

One value of defining consensus this way is that it’s actually achievable. What the thumb process does is force major conflicts and issues to come out into the open as soon as possible so you can deal with them. Plus, there is an interesting side effect. Once you’ve defined consensus—assuming you do so at the very beginning—when it comes time to make decisions, people tend to become much more flexible than if they thought the goal was perfect agreement.

A skilled facilitator can often achieve this kind of consensus on issues that are plenty controversial within an organization. At the public media organization I worked with, my initial interviews showed that certain staff members had a pretty restrictive view about what was acceptable to do as part of promotions to increase membership or bring in sponsorship money (whether digital or more traditional). By the end, they had become more flexible than they had initially appeared. The station was ready to reconsider whether it should have a membership card program, with discounts at arts venues, local activities, and certain partner stores—something that wasn’t really an option when we started. While there were plenty of factors at work in this shift, one was certainly the flexibility that developed as the group I was working with achieved thumbs-based consensus time after time. 

 [Photo by anon courtesy of PhotoRee.]