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.

Dropping the Fiction of Multitasking

While I like variety in my work, I’m a lousy multitasker. I’m at my best doing one thing at a time. Plus I need to build in a quick pause when I shift my brain from one kind of task to another.

Those characteristics should make me precisely the wrong kind of person to thrive in the modern working world. We’re told in a variety of ways that being able to multitask is the norm. You should be able to write memos while perusing a research report and checking email. It’s hard to have a meeting and not hear the click, click of people texting while they’re listening. And it’s hard to find a job posting that doesn’t ask for someone who is a multitasker (in addition to being a self-starter and entrepreneurial)

Well, multitasking is a crock.

Measurement Has Its Limits: The Cookie-Radish Effect

 No willpower needed

I recently wrote about how measuring your own activity, using something as simple as a stopwatch in the shower, can pay off big time in behavioral change. (It can speed you up on tasks you tend to do slowly.) That said, I’ve recently run into a few people who take that concept much further. They schedule tasks for themselves in 10-minute intervals and constantly check to see whether they’re on time and on task. I’ve even talked to one colleague who suggested I do something similar.

Yikes! I can’t imagine being a slave to the stopwatch in that way. But I want to have a clearer reason why such a thing makes no sense for me. Something more than it just doesn’t feel right. So here it is:

When you force yourself to do something that takes a lot of effort or willpower, what you are actually doing is using the rational part of your brain (the part that handles executive functioning) to take over from the more emotional and instinctive part of your brain (the part that wants to do what feels right). Well, there’s a lot of research that suggests that most people have rational effort/willpower in limited quantities. Use too much of it and you’ll begin to run out.

Less Taxing To Do Lists: A Self-Justification

I have a quirky way of making to do lists. As you’d expect, I include all the complicated things I need to get done by breaking them down into simpler steps. But I also make sure to include super-basic items that take almost no effort, as well as a few that I’ve already completed and can check off without actually doing anything. For some reason, the list looks less daunting this way.

Here’s an example. I’ve been slogging through my taxes over the past couple of weeks, and I made a point of writing in really easy items along with all the important complicated stuff. Things like gathering up the W-2 forms that came in the mail from our employers and creating the pile of tax-related receipts I will eventually need to deal with. I even gave myself kudos for filling out the cover page of a tax organizer from the accountant we work with. Of course there are other to do items that make my brain sputter and fizzle. (Itemizing? Ack!)

Lani finds the odd mélange in my to do lists amusing, but now I’ve found some scientific backup. It even has a fancy, scientific-sounding name. It’s called the endowed progress effect.