Employing Differences, Episode 55: Didn't we already decide this?

Paul: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:16

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:17

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:20

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Didn't we already decide this?"

Paul: 0:30

Decisions are one of the most fascinating and frustrating things in groups. When we work together, we have to make decisions collectively. There are lots of different ways that those decisions might get distributed. We've talked about some of those on the show here before. But one of the things that I think a lot of groups don't think about is, "How can this decision be changed?" Different people have different tolerances for that. So I've worked in groups before where there are definitely people who once the decision is made, they want to know that we're not going to go back and change it. And so if something comes up the kind of challenges that decision, they're the ones who were asking, "Didn't we already decide this?" And there are other people who really want to know that we can come back and revisit decisions if we get new information, if we learn stuff about it. But if we haven't talked about what it means to make a decision, and what it means in order to revisit a decision, that can be a huge source of stress and conflict and disagreement in groups. And so Karen, I know that you do a bunch of work with groups about how they make decisions, and about how they revisit decisions. I'm curious how you help groups grapple with this question of when do we revisit a decision and when we don't, and working with that tension.

Karen: 2:09

Yeah, so you know, I think it's like a lot of things we talk about where there's sort of spectrums. And so this is a case where I think it's useful to kind of think about both ends of the spectrum. So there certainly are decisions where they were long, hard fought. It was a ton of work and we worked on that thing for a year which, if you're in the corporate world might seem like a thing that never happens, but in consensus groups happens a lot. That, you know, we really, really, really worked through that and we got to a decision about it. And you know, a year or two later, somebody new joins the group or a couple of new people join the group, and they go, "Well, why is it that way? Let's reopen that decision." They didn't even know, they're not even saying let's reopen. They're saying, let's talk about this. And the group is like,"No, no, no!" We've had that conversation, it was painful, we aren't going back there. And often that comes off like not in clear ways and can be sort of it can land like, "Well, that's not the way we do it. And you're not allowed to have an opinion about it." And you know, so you can get tension around newcomer-ness with that. And so that's sort of one set, one extreme of like, yeah, you don't want to put yourself back through the same conversation that you've had before, for all of the 1000s of reasons that decisions can be hard. You don't want to make the hard decisions every month. You don't want to have the same conversations at every meeting. And on the flip side, you can easily imagine decisions that, you know, communities make decisions about having WiFi or something. Well, that's a very different decision now. Or, you know, do we put electric charging stations in our parking lot? Well, that would have been a very different decision 10 years ago than it would be today, because an awful lot of society has changed around that. Costs have come down, usefulness has gone up, demand just got up. And so those are the sort of extremes. And then there's the space in between where it's not so clear. And so the the thing I really recommend to groups is make a plan for how you decide whether to reopen or revisit a decision and have that conversation first. So before you just dive into the thing that you have talked about before, come to the group and say, "You know we made a decision 10 years ago not to have electric vehicle charging stations in our parking lot, because it didn't make sense then. I think there's a bunch of new information about this. I'd like to talk about it again. Can we discuss that again?" And get the group buy-in to say, "Yeah, we're up for that conversation. It does seem like enough has changed." And I want to flag here that sometimes the thing that has changed is the opinions of the group, whether because you've got new group members, or just people have different ideas. Maybe what's being said is, "We made a decision a year ago, that felt like a really good decision to me then. I supported it then. And as we're living with that decision, I just don't feel good about it anymore. I'd like to reopen it. It's not turning out the way I thought it would. As I'm living it, I'm feeling differently about it." So it doesn't have to be a bunch of external data shift, but that somehow something has shifted, and as a group, we have to have a way to look at that. Because what you don't want is for the group to be captive to the one person who says, "Well, I don't really like the way that came out, so I'm going to bring it up again, and hope I get my way this time." And everyone's stuck in a conversation they don't want to have. But at the same time, when that person has the wisdom, and there actually is a better way, you want a way for them to have an access. So I think you want some kind of policy that says,"These are kind of the criteria we use. Has something changed? Have feelings changed? Has it been long enough that it's just reasonable to review it?" You know, that we will go back and review. And then you bring the question to the group. And I actually even in consensus groups think this is one of the places to use a vote. And just make a quick, "You've got five minutes to make your case for why we should reopen it." And then it's a quick vote. And if two thirds of the people want to reopen it, we do. And if not, we don't drag people back into that conversation. And so some pretty straightforward process that's that's small process, that's not like "takes days" process. And the other thing I want to flag here is that the other thing that I do recommend is that, in general, most decisions really benefit from a review date. So that when we make the decision, we say in advance we're going to reopen it. We're gonna try it out for six months, and we're then we're gonna talk about it again. So if it's built into the decision that you're going to reopen it, then you don't need that reopen policy in the same way. So in sociocratic systems that that's built in to every decision. The sociocracy approach is that every decision has a review date. Then they don't need a policy for how you're going to decide whether to reopen things. So yeah, those are the kind of different approaches.

Paul: 7:40

I really like particularly that last thing. It's funny: One of the things that I will often do with groups, when we're talking about, "Hey, let's try something" or we make a decision to do this thing and it's a change to the way the team has been doing it or the group has been working with the thing, we like to time bound to that."Hey, we're gonna commit to this for this period of time and then revisit whether or not we want to stick with it or whether or not we want to go back or what we want to do about it." And that I find actually helps us make decisions easier because it's very concrete what we're actually talking about doing. I'm not saying I'm going to commit to this forever. What I'm saying is, I'm willing to try it for six months or three months, or whatever it is. And because I know we're going to come back to the decision. So the review date thing, I think is a really valuable tool for all kinds of things. Now, then you actually need to be somewhat diligent about writing down what you decided and actually coming back on those dates to review them, because nothing will erode people's trust in that system more than not actually revisiting them. I think there's two things that came up as you were talking, that jumped into my brain around revisiting decisions that I think may be interesting to dig into. So one is when we want to revisit a decision, I think one of the things that's useful to do is not to necessarily use language that makes the old decision be wrong. I think I think we can revisit decisions and go, "This was exactly the right thing to do at the time. And I think we need to revisit it to see if it's still the right thing to do." I think we might also come to that place of, "Hey, based on what I know now, I would have decided something different back back then." Although there's actually a bunch of stuff about quality of decisions there. There's a whole can of worms there that I'm not going to get into. But I often think that that's not a useful place to start with a group. To say like,"Ao I think we really screwed up this decision. We need to revisit it." And I imagine you've seen that.

Karen: 9:58

Yes. I think that yeah, the blaming thing. And my favorite in that is, "Well, I told you it was a terrible idea," or "I didn't really support it. I just went along with it because everybody else wanted it." Anything anywhere near "I told you so" is probably not helpful to group process.

Paul: 10:22

Yeah. And that connects to the second thing that I sort of noticed in there is that I think that asking to revisit a decision can be more welcomed by the group when it's clear that you're doing it for the group rather than purely for yourself. And so if you can talk about the things that you're noticing about what has changed, what you now know, things like that, through the lens of how you think that would actually make things a lot better for the group, then I think groups are much more willing to reopen those decisions, and to sort of go back to those. So this is maybe a little bit more of a"tips about how to effectively go back to decisions." Don't blame, don't say "I told you so," and talk about how you think revisiting it could be a benefit to the group but you also have to really mean that.

Karen: 11:19

Yeah. I think this is a case where storytelling is particularly useful. So if whether you're the one wanting to revisit or however when this comes up in a group if you can tell the story of the decision."This is how this came up. This is how we got here. And these are the things we thought about then, and this is what we learned." And you know, in a pretty positive frame, this is what we were thinking and why we thought it would be a good idea. And these parts of that turned out to be true. And these are the things that have changed. So you sort of get this timeline that may even be more of an overview that I think is likely to be way more effective than pelting people with a bunch of facts. Which there there is a tendency to do that, that I have seen. Like "I'm going to prove to you" when what they actually just need is to get the context that maybe the person who's most in it has and the others do not.

Paul: 12:19

Yeah, that idea of of using narrative to really bring people along. It turns out, there's a lot of research that shows that our brains respond way better to that. That's just more how our our brains work, which is why storytelling is such a big thing in human culture. And so using that to to bring people along, to as you put it establish context, and then kind of work with it. I think the other thing around that is just don't try to reopen a decision if you aren't willing for it to not happen. I think it is useful to go back if I'm noticing something in a group. Hey, we decided this thing. I'm noticing these things in the group where maybe it's not working out, so I think we might want to reopen it. And maybe there's enough sense in the group, "Okay, maybe we should go back and revisit it." I still need to be okay with the group going, "Actually, after reconsidering it, we're gonna stick with what we were doing. We're not going to change the decision." If I'm not willing to do that and to live with that if I'm only willing to engage in that process if I get what I want, if the decision goes the way that I wanted to if I'm not willing to be influenced by the stories that other people are telling, by what they're seeing, then I think things are likely not going to go how we all kind of want them to. So I think that's really, for me, that's the thing about revisiting decisions is that it's an opportunity for us to influence each other by sharing information that's relevant, and sharing our experiences, and then doing whatever process that is that we use to make decisions as a group. And again, trusting in that and having the same sort of trust in the people that you're part of this group with, just like you did in the original decision.

Karen: 14:20

And what you're pointing to there is what I think of is the culture piece of this, which is so important. Because you want to be in the space of high trust. Because one thing you don't want like if you use a practice, like I talked about where we do an "up or down" vote on revisiting, you want to be clear that you're deciding whether we think we have the thing to talk about, and not just, "Well, I know I don't want the thing to happen, so I'm gonna vote no on revisiting so that I will get my outcome at the end." Like, you can really subvert that process with, "I've already decided what I want and now I'm just mechanizing to get it." And that's not going to ever go well. And another version of that is when the original decision is being made and you're putting this review date in, you don't want to have people in the group saying,"Alright, I'll put up with a stupid thing until the review date, and then I'll get my way." And so they're just like counting down the minutes. This is not the culture we're after. We're really after a culture where everybody can say, "You know, if that's what the group decided that must be what the group needs." And if I'm not seeing a really compelling reason that the group shouldn't go that way, then my job now is to get on board.

Paul: 15:45

One of the things I actually think that points to is also a reason to revisit decisions like new information that may come to light is a realization that we didn't actually have the level of agreement that we needed, or maybe even that we thought we did. We may discover later on And I've seen this in groups all the time, where you realize after the fact, "Oh, we had some people who kind of grudgingly went along with it, But they hid that well enough until afterwards," that we might just go, "Okay, hold on, we've actually figured out that there's not enough buy-in for this to work." And this is a separate topic, but it is a question within any group when you're making a decision, how much buy in what level of support do we actually need for this particular decision for this particular agreement? And do we have that? And so I think one of the things that may cause us to revisit a decision is to discover we were wrong about how much we needed or had. We're noticing that we're not actually able to carry it out because it didn't have the support we thought it did.

Karen: 16:55

I think that's absolutely where we're at. So I think we're we're coming to is that you want a way to reopen or revisit decisions because lots of reasons: things change, people change. You want to have the thought about those in advance. You want to have that plan before you're in it. And you want to plan that allows for revisiting when it's useful, but doesn't drag your group through repeatedly the same conversation over and over again when nothing has changed. And so a couple of mechanisms for that. One is just to have a reopen vote, that you can just say, "Is this a thing we want to reopen?" If most of us want to talk about it, we do. And then the other is to build in revisit dates review dates into the decisions that you're making. And those aren't mutually exclusive. You can roll with both of those within your group. But you want that plan before you need it. That's one of those things you want to set up early on. And if it's not early on for you, then today would be good.

Paul: 18:05

That's really true. Yeah, decisions are tricky and multifaceted things, which is one of the reasons why we come back around to them a lot, but they are one of the things that really helps a group actually do the things that they need to do. So I think that is going to do it for us for today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 18:23

And I'm Karen Gimnig an this has been Employing Di ferences.