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Open decision making

Group decisions used to be so easy to make. The leader of the group made a decision and everyone else listened. The leader may be a manager, a team lead or the alpha in a social group. Was that decision the best one for the group? Did it take everything into account? It didn’t really matter because people didn’t want to buck authority and face the ramifications. This fit very well into the strict hierarchical society that has been slowly eroding for the past 20 years.

Recently, there has been more recognition of the value of collaborative decisions. Leaders started to understand that allowing group members to influence and participate does not lower their standing. Requesting feedback from people before finalizing a decision brings new perspectives, experience and ideas to the table. Just as importantly, it shows the people in your group that you care about what they think and respect their experience and knowledge. Gaining buy-in and ownership of a decision is hugely important today, when you want to empower your group to not only follow a decision, but be passionate about it as well. Passionate people are more likely to put in their full efforts and do whatever it takes to bring it to completion.

So how do you go about starting a collaborative decision process?
These are the 5 stages involved:
  • Early engagement
  • Diverse participants
  • Request feedback and encourage changes
  • Ask for and encourage dissent
  • Incorporate ideas



The first thing you need to engage your group early on in the process. If you already have a full proposal before you start discussing the idea, it will be much more difficult to convince them that you really are interested in what they have to say. Start off with a high level objective and ask, “what can we do to meet this?”. The earlier in the process you start the more ownership and empowerment you will grant to the group.




Having diverse participants in discussions gives you a wider range of perspectives. Diverse can be anything that will cause a different perspective. Men and women often see things differently, as do people who grew up in different cultures. Neurodiversity, different personal situations, race, religion and different professions are all aspects that are going to influence their perspectives. It’s important not to just try to check boxes or make sure that you have an “Asian opinion”. After you ensure that your group is diverse, all ideas expressed should be treated equally.

Make sure that you are encouraging participation and specifically ask people for their input. Keep in mind that if you tell someone that their idea is dumb they will likely not contribute to the discussion anymore. Not every idea is good or appropriate, but try to foment discussion or bring up challenges that will need to be overcome. It could be that while the initial idea can’t be used because of those challenges, when opening the conversation it will suddenly become feasible when someone comes up with a way to overcome the challenges or modify the idea slightly.




Dissent, or disagreement, is an important aspect of making sure that ideas are thoroughly vetted. While the discussion has to be respectful, always relate to the idea when disagreeing and not to the person who suggested it. Ideas that go through the gauntlet and are picked apart, are purified and should be bulletproof by the time the process is complete. So the more you can enable discussion, dissent and disagreement, the better off your idea will be.



Finally, don’t just offer lip service to an inclusive decision making process. You have to actually enable and empower the group to actually influence. Give credit for good ideas. Communicate how the open process bettered the decision. 


This concept is called “Open decision making”, which is very aligned with the open source philosophy that is very prevalent in today’s software development ecosystem. Red Hat, the company I work for, has defined an Open Decision Framework which goes into depth describing how this all works.

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