March 12, 2020: Distributed Decisionmaking
Today’s newsletter explores a distributed-first decisionmaking process. The only article you need to read about coronavirus is this.
In tech companies, the typical decisionmaking process looks like this:
Everyone relevant gets in the same room
The various facts and opinions are discussed verbally
A decision is made (some teams require consensus, others a vote, others a dictator).
(well actually it’s usually more of a mess than this, but ideally it looks something like the above)
When a team is distributed, this process breaks down.
Team members may be all around the world, and timezones might make coordinating a meeting time hard or even impossible.
Discussion is hard, for a number of reasons (video/audio lag, missed emotional cues, lack of common tools like whiteboards)
This results in both slower and worse decisions.
Rather than trying to emulate the in-person decisionmaking process, another approach is to start from scratch with a process that is built with the distributed reality in mind.
Wikipedia is an example of distributed decisionmaking. Every article has a Talk page that hosts a discussion for topics like proposed changes. The Telecommuting page, for example, has a current discussion about renaming the page to Work from home (unsurprisingly, I support renaming Telecommuting to WFH).
Learning from Wikipedia and the wonderful distributed team at Basecamp, the key elements of a distributed decisionmaking process are:
Commitment to this decisionmaking process
A single shared place for discussion
Prewritten positions
A method for avoiding deadlock
Commitment to the process is important because it causes people to actually participate in the decision. This is their chance to contribute to the decision.
The shared place for discussion allows someone to see all of the perspectives.
The prewritten positions and rebuttals let people fully express their thoughts, leading to better arguments.
A method for avoiding deadlock ensures the decision actually gets made. The implication is that consensus is not an effective method, because it can result in deadlock. Other methods like majority-vote or establishing a dictator for the decision satisfy this clause.
Yes, this process is slower than everyone in the same room discussing and making a decision. But a virtual room is not the same as a physical room, for the reasons mentioned above.
Also note that not every decision needs this process. Reserve this process for decisions where a better decision outweighs raw speed. If you need raw speed, it’s hard to get faster than pushing decisions out to the people who are blocked until a decision has been made.
The beautiful part of a distributed decisionmaking process like this is that it enables almost anyone, anywhere on the planet, to contribute to this decision.
Graph of the day
See you tomorrow!