Learnings Around Decision Making

by Matilde Zadig
Emergence
Changes are integral to emergence. The balance between policies/systems and everyday decisions can easily become a challenge.
In BIP, the people involved, the group or organisations they represented, project subgroups, capacity and resources continuously shifted. This made the balance between “policy” and “operational decisions” quite challenging at times (more on healthy balance according to Sociocracy here). We kept coming up against seemingly “new” situations and “new” decisions needing to be made.
Some of these involved knowing/deciding:

• Which decisions we need and didn’t need to make together as Core Team/subgroups
• Who was trusted and empowered to make a certain decision (whose role/responsibility is was)
• What to do and what not to do (how to make sure we were sticking with the purpose of the programme)
• Who was impacted by a decision
• Who needed to be taken into account
• Who was and wasn’t part of the ‘Core Team’ (we didn’t have a ‘Members Policy’)
• What it meant and didn’t mean to be part of ‘Core Team’
• How to recruit/bring new people on board
  • Depending on whether it was to deliver a specific task, fill a certain role, or for a certain duration of time or a short-term project
• How to remunerate people (we had several different rates that have had to be adapted to circumstances such as working with young people)
• How to induct new people (we didn’t have a clear induction process)
• How to let go of people and parts of the programme (exit strategies and goodbyes)
• How to support someone’s role changing (when someone was able and willing to step into more responsibility or needed a more clearly defined role)
• How to deal with disagreements, conflict and how to have difficult conversations
  Decision-making System
  There’s always a system, an agreed way of doing things. Even when we say ‘we don’t have an agreed system’ (that is a system in itself).
  What that meant for BIP is that often we would:
• Agree (whether by default, consensual/explicit or not) to not make a clear decision
• Realise/not realise that we didn’t have enough information to make a decision
• Not know exactly what information we were missing
• Weren’t sure about the resource (budget) implications, whether it was within our resources, or where the resources could/should come from (which budget line)
• Didn’t know who should/could know whether a decision was right/possible
• Take a very long time (up to six months!) to reach a decision. Because of the things listed above, or because sometimes the time just wasn’t quite right yet
• Wait for someone else to make the decision for us. Someone who we think had more insight/knowledge/capacity/experience/rank to make the decision
• Use passive consent (no clear objections) in order to make decisions. Often that also meant not many people expressed what they thought and felt. This might also have been because we didn’t:

• Feel safe to say what we think and feel (psychological safety)

  • Feel like our thoughts mattered/that the decision was in our hands
  • Feel like we had enough knowledge/background info to comment
  • Feel enthusiastic about it, or that
  • We weren’t sure what our healthy boundaries were (as roles/BIP?)
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