When Committees Are Authorized to Make Decisions

One of the key challenges for groups of 20+ members working with consensus is how to effectively delegate. If you retain all decision-making in the plenary it invariably leads to a bottleneck—on the one hand there are too many plenaries and they last too long; on the other, committees are almost certainly underutilized (and probably demoralized by being expected to content themselves doing only scut work in service to the plenary).

[In this essay, "committee" is any subgroup of the whole, including a manager, who acts on behalf of the whole.]

In groups of 20 or more I strongly advocate that plenaries concentrate their attention on whole group concerns (such as interpreting common values as they apply to an issue, setting the annual budget, or defining member rights and responsibilities) and delegate to committees decision-making authority on all details that drop below the need for whole group deliberation. That said, stating theory is much easier than setting it up and having it go smoothly. There are challenges to getting delegation to work as elegantly as you can draw it up in a multicolored organizational diagram.

I was spurred to write about this issue (the underbelly of delegation) by a conversation I had recently at a community struggling with the question of what constituted fair notice of meetings at which decisions might be made that impacted everyone. The problem was that the group was committed to two core principles that weren't necessarily playing well together: a) transparency and the opportunity for people not on the committee to offer relevant input; and b) committees having a clear pathway to get their work done without being hamstrung by late input or complaints after the fact. What is the balance point between due process and efficiency?

Here are my thoughts about a checklist that consensus groups could use in assessing whether the committee is on solid ground or quicksand when exercising decision-making authority on behalf of the whole:

1. Is the committee coloring inside the lines?
Is it clear that the committee has the authority to make the decision? If there is any question about this it will generally go better if the committee pauses to get its mandate clarified before proceeding. Even with the best of intentions, wording can be exposed as ambiguous in particular situations and it will go better if you're asking for permission than forgiveness.

2. Adequate notification
•  Develop a protocol for how committee reports are organized, such that notification of work on pending issues is listed up front—perhaps in the subject line or the opening paragraph. The standard for notification should be blessed by the plenary, and it should specify how far in advance of the meeting the notice needs to be posted.

• If the committee thinks that there might be controversy or strong interest in the issue from members not on the committee, then it can use HOT TOPIC in the subject line, or some other attention getter that everyone understands. If they think that the issue is hot enough, they might even set up a special meeting with the expectation that it will be an all skate.

• If the person with input cannot attend the committee meeting at which the topic will be addressed, they can send comments electronically, or meet privately with a committee member ahead of time to convey their views. Note: It can be important that all group members understand this informal option (rather than complain later about being disenfranchised).

• Is email notice alone satisfactory? If there are members who don't read email, maybe you also need to post a notice on a bulletin board or stuff notices in mailboxes… or maybe something involving carrier pigeons. In this day of expanding media options it behooves the plenary to spell out "adequate" in unambiguous terms.

3. When email isn't the right medium
Email is good for posting notices; less good for discussing issues, and downright bad for expressing or processing upset. Although I'm laying this out as if it's a done deal that email will be the primary mode of communication, I think if any party—on the committee or not—finds that email (or Tweets or Facebook) isn't working for them that they should be able to request moving to face-to-face communication and that that will be honored. Putting this one agreement in place will alone cut down on all manner of mischief, miscommunication, and unhelpful teapot tempests.

4. When input arrives late
While the committee is expected to work respectfully with input from all group members (not just members of the committee) that arrives in a timely manner, group members are expected to respect that it's unreasonable (and possibly disrespectful) to submit input after the deadline and expect the committee to back up. Committees may be smart to reconsider their thinking in light of late input, but they shouldn't be obliged to.

5. When the committee feels a disturbance in The Force
If the committee suspects that there may be more input than they've heard or that feathers may otherwise be ruffled, it may purposefully chose to proceed more cautiously than authorized. For example, the committee might post its decision as tentative and allow a comment period (two weeks?) before going to final, even though it has the plenary-blessed imprimatur to do so immediately. I'm not saying that they have to; I'm saying it may be prudent.

6. When criticism surfaces after the decision has been made
Perhaps a member is unhappy with the decision and believes some crucial piece of information may have been missed. They speak up to encourage the committee to reconsider the matter. While the member has the right to do this, it is linked to the responsibility to inform themselves of the committee's thinking (as captured in the minutes) to see if their concerns were already taken into account. Going the other way, it's the committee's responsibility to see that the minutes are good enough to accomplish this.

Alternately, a member may speak up because they feel the impact on the group has not been adequately thought through. Instead of new information they may have a markedly different take on the decision's consequences.

These possibilities lead us to:

7. When to reconsiderIn wrestling with whether to revisit a decision, I think the standard should be if any of the following conditions obtain:

•  Did the committee fail to follow the group's process agreements in reaching its decision?

•  Is there sufficient new information to justify a revisit? This is a judgment call. We never have all the information and there is always discernment about when there is enough in hand (about which you have reasonable confidence in its quality) to proceed.

•  Did the announcement of the decision trigger sufficient anguish and gnashing of teeth that it will likely affect implementation if unaddressed?

If the answer to any of these questions is "yes," then it's adequate grounds to reconsider. Otherwise, play on.

8. What if the committee is done and the energy is still unsettled?
While this hopefully is a rare occurrence (where reconsideration is requested and the committee declines), I think there should be another body (perhaps Steering or Oversight, if you have either of these animals in your committee bestiary) designated to step in and call for a meeting anyway—probably a plenary—to address the tensions and effect a return to laminar flow.

• • •

What I've tried to offer in this essay is a framework for troubleshooting problems in effective delegating. That said, more will hinge on an abundance of good will and the sense of everyone pulling on the oars together, than on the creation of airtight agreements. In my experience, energy issues are not solved well by structural responses—it's like trying to turn a nut with a screwdriver.

If people with concerns don't trust that they'll be heard, they'll be much more disposed to whining and monkey wrenching. However, if people feel they're input is welcome, then much of this will be sorted out through common sense and informal conversations over a cup of coffee or a beer.

Son of Hierarchy

Following my post of six days ago (Hierarchy in Cooperative Groups) I got a burst of responses from Abe that makes me wonder how god a job I did at expressing myself, so I'm devoting today's entry to a response:

—Abe #1
Expertise and influence are not the same thing as hierarchy. 

I agree. While influence is the basis for differences in power, hierarchy (in cooperative groups, which is what I was writing about) exists when individuals or subgroups (such as a committee or task force) are authorized to make decisions on behalf of the whole. That is, the authorized person (or persons) can make decisions that others in the group cannot.

Delegation is not the same thing as hierarchy, as long as the community has oversight.


If the individual or subgroup is authorized to make decisions binding on the whole then it is hierarchy. If the individual or subgroup is only advisory—and the ability to make decisions continues to be held by the plenary, then delegation does not necessarily equate to hierarchy (I'm equivocating here because sometimes managers or committees accrue enough power that it is very difficult for others to object to their proposals, even when everyone in the group has that power in theory. 

Having oversight, or the ability to overturn a subgroup decision, is not that same as having the power to institute a decision. The essential point here is that there is an official group-blessed power differential. 

When I'm advocating for the judicious use of hierarchy in cooperative groups, I am not proposing that that managers or subgroups be given absolute power such decisions cannot be questioned. Rather, I'm trying to make the case for delegating authority in the interest of reserving plenary attention only for those things where full group engagement is prudent.

Expertise in a participatory community can stand by itself. The power is in the knowledge itself and not the person. 

Not quite. Sometimes authority is given to people simply because they are perceived to be wise; not because they are perceived to have superior skill or more experience relevant to the job description. 

As a contrast, if a teacher holds hierarchical authority over a student, the power is in "because I said so!"

Hierarchy is the structure that results from the belief that some people are superior to others. It is also the structure that promotes that belief.




While that's one version of hierarchy, I'm talking about choosing to delegate authority because it's more efficient (and because experience and skill relevant to the job are not uniformly distributed among group members).
 
Laird, you have written recently on your blog about the delicate balance of delegation. If delegation gets too far from center, transparency and decisions that are representative of the group take a loss. 




Hmm. If "too far from center" means coloring outside the lines (exceeding the authority given by the group), then I absolutely think there needs to be a way to rein that in. I'm a big fan of clear mandates that spell out when the subgroup can act on behalf of the whole and when ti needs to consult. Further, mandates should spell out reporting requirements (which address transparency concerns). For a more thorough presentation of a delegation template, refer to my blog of March 20, 2010, Consensus from Soup to Nuts.

That said, I don't that managers or committees necessarily need to make decisions that are "representative of the group" so much as they need to make decisions that are in the groups best interest, and in line with their mandate. Sometimes the best decision is not the most popular.

I end up having conversations with people new to the idea of an egalitarian community. They get caught up in the root word "equal" and say, "Well we can not be all equal! Some of are better at this than that, and we all have different abilities." I respond with saying that egalitarianism is about giving people more equal access to resources and decision-making. If a member comes into our community and is taller than the rest of the group, we're not going to lop off his feet to shorten him. 

Whew.

Similarly, democracy or participatory decision-making does not mean all decisions are made by everyone about everything all the time. It does mean that for a healthy democracy, hierarchy is to be avoided.

Sorry, Abe. I don't buy it. Within the context that hierarchy (delegation of authority to a subgroup) is accompanied by: a) clear mandates; b) a thoughtful process for selecting the person(s) who fill the position; and c) regular opportunities for evaluation, then I'm of the view that healthy cooperative groups of 20 or more people probably cannot function well without hierarchy.

—Abe #2
Here is another point of concern for certain types of delegation:

"We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist’s brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war." - Buckminster Fuller (Synergistics 1975)  

If you're saying that delegation and specialization can be taken too far, I agree. If, however, you're interpreting Bucky Fuller to mean that all delegation is specious, I think that's going too far. After 40 years of community living (the last 26 of which I've been a process consultant, and have worked professionally with perhaps 100 groups), my overwhelming impression is that most cooperative groups delegate poorly and members are loathe to serve on committees or to accept managerships because so much of their work is undone or regularly second-guessed in plenary. 

The problem is not so much that the subgroups or managers are too specialized in their knowledge; it's that the plenary doesn't know how to let go (all the while complaining about how frequent the meetings are)!

—Abe #3
Hierarchy can be efficient in the decision making, and slow in the implementation. 

Only if the mandates are unclear, or the subgroup is doing a poor job of soliciting and working constructively with input from outside the committee.

Underlings tend to drag their feet more. Having a sense of common ownership brings more investment to workers.



I agree with this. If delegation translates into an us/them dynamic (by which I mean dividing the group into an in-the-subgroup faction and a not-in-the-subgroup faction) then you'll definitely have problems. But clean delegation doesn't have be like that.
 
In carrying out the values and thoughts of a group, hierarchy is very inefficient. 

Huh? Not if you have the right people in the right roles.

It would be better to take from permaculture and plan more ahead of time, so the implementation is quicker and so the system can sustain itself longer. 

I'm pro planning, pro being careful about crafting good mandates, and agree that when decisions are handled well in cooperative groups then implementation sings. Yet those things do not add up to an injunction against delegating authority. They add up to being prudent.

Hierarchy in Cooperative Groups

Happy Inauguration Day!

As we're not installing a President today—we did that last year and it only happens quadrennially (a word I rarely get to use in mixed company)—I'm using the occasion to write about power and hierarchy in a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Over the course of the last two months I've run into considerable buzz among advocates for cooperative culture around the concept that maybe hierarchy isn't all bad. The interesting thing to me is that this has been shared with an aroma of heresy—and I've been scratching my head to understand why, or even why this is considered an insight.

Mostly, cooperative culture is build on the bedrock concepts of equality and fairness. Having lived in intentional community for 40 years, those are certainly core values to me and to network groups I've been part of, including the Federation of Egalitarian Communities and the Fellowship for Intentional Community. But what does "equality" mean?

I believe it's the idea that all people have fundamental rights:
o  Access to the essentials of life: food, clothing, shelter, health, education
o  Opportunity to have input on decisions affecting their life
o  An explanation when things don't go their way
o  Access to meaningful work
o  Support in hard times

I further believe it's the idea that all people have basic responsibilities:
o  To contribute to the well-being of others (parallel to what has been extended to them)
o  To follow through on commitments and to abide by agreements
o  To do one's fair share (which includes a proportionate share of the grunt work)
o  To treat others with basic respect
o  To listen to what others have to say on matters of joint interest, and to consider viewpoints differ than one's own

Having said all that, I don't think it means everyone is equally talented or has equal power. In fact, I think that's absurd. My commitment to everyone having a chance to offer their views does not guarantee that everyone's view will be given equal weight—that depends on the perceived merits of what they've said, which is actually a fairly complex calculus (more on that below).

Equal Whether You Like it or Not
Some groups committed to equality adopt the practice of rotating everyone through positions of authority (thus, in a group of 10, every tenth meeting it would be your turn to facilitate). The good side of this is that:

a) It gives everyone a taste of the role. Sometimes taking a turn as facilitator can have an amazingly salutary effect on how people participate in meetings. Having walked in the facilitator's moccasins, members tend to be more respectful and less rebellious when others are in that role.

b) Sometimes people need to be nudged into taking the first step. If the initial experience goes well enough that may be all they need to keep at it and develop a new skill, benefiting everyone.

c) It prevents people getting locked into roles that they'd rather not be assigned permanently. Sometimes people become victims of their talent or their success, and the group gets lazy about developing replacements or substitutes.

d) It's demonstrably fair, and avoids any hard feelings about why someone never gets picked.

Turning the coin over, the bad side is:

e) Talent is almost always unevenly distributed. If everyone takes a turn, that means the group is guaranteed to suffer through bouts of less competent people in the role. That can get expensive.

f) The flip side of b) is that a person can be traumatized by being pushed into a role they don't want and having it go poorly (which result is all the more likely when someone doesn't want the role in the first place). In addition to poor results for the group, it scars the person, and what's the good in that?

g) It undercuts the value of having the group get explicit about what it wants from that role, since assignments won't be based on ability to meet the criteria.

—Laird's Take
I think the best melding of these poles is to have the group commit resources to helping people learn the skills needed to do any job that the group depends on, and then giving them opportunities to practice what they're learning appropriate to their development. Thus, the group commits to broadening the leadership base, yet doesn't insist on people taking turns in roles they want no part of, and people are not assigned roles they are not (yet) equipped to handle well.

All Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal than Others
This is a paraphrase from Animal Farm, George Orwell's 1945 satirical allegory about the concentration of power under Stalin in the name of the proletariat, ultimately recapitulating the very abuses of power that the communists were inspired to overthrow the Russian czars to address.

Understanding the distribution of power in cooperative groups is a tricky and volatile issue. I think of power as the ability to get others to do something, or to agree to something. In essence, I'm defining power as influence. In addition, there is the concept of authority, by which I mean a group-granted license to act on the group's behalf.

In democratic groups the plenary (meeting of the whole) is the ultimate repository of authority. Sometimes (typically not as often as they should) authority is delegated to committees or managers. However, irrespective of authority, let's look more deeply at power in the context of the plenary. It's my observation that the ability to influence is never evenly distributed among the membership.

This has to do with many things:

o  Experience germane to the issue
If you're discussing how to address a burst water pipe in the common house, the views of the member who's a retired plumber are going to carry more weight.

o  Track record
People whose advice has proven sound in the past will be listened to more closely.

o  Persuasiveness 
Those more comfortable speaking in group and more cogent in their comments are likely to be more successful in garnering support for their views.

o  Sagacity
People who are perceived to listen well to what others have said and can consistently place the group's interests ahead of their own tend to have more sway.

o  Privilege
We have all been conditioned to defer to some categories of people over others, independent of the above factors. Even where there is explicit agreement to be conscious of privilege, and to not be influenced by it, it takes constant vigilance to be aware of its presence.

(To illuminate how confusing this can be, I have a tremendous amount of privilege in the context of the mainstream culture: white, older, male, straight, Protestant upbringing, college educated, well-off middle class parents. That said, cooperative groups trying to create an alternative to privileged-based culture are aware of this and are thus on guard in how they hear me, wanting to be diligent about not accidentally agreeing with me out of conditioning—rather than on the basis of my thinking and experience. It can get pretty messy discerning between the two.)

—Laird's Take
While that's not everything, it's enough to establish the complexity of the dynamic. In general, cooperative groups want to promote power (influence) being used for the good of the whole (power with) instead of its being used for the benefit of some at the expense of others (power over). In managing this, it's imperative that groups are able to talk openly and authentically about the perception that power has been used inappropriately. If, however, they are operating under the misguided notion that power is flatly distributed (because that's the group's intention) then it becomes impossible to have this conversation, and members will be oriented to seeing the boogie man everywhere—because exercising power will be seen as prima facie evidence of an out-of-control ego. It'll be a witch hunt. (Among other things, if members are laboring under the assumption that they should get their way as often as everyone else—independent of the quality of their views—it leads to the automatic analysis that consistent failure to prevail translates into their not having been heard, and that they're being systematically discriminated against. Ugh.)

While it's good to protect the equality of opportunity for everyone to add their piece to the consideration, it's ridiculous to pretend that everyone's influence will be equal.

Delegate or Die
More subtly, there is a relatively common notion among groups using consensus that the plenary should, more or less, decide everything. While that's not such a big deal in a group of four to six, it's totally out of hand in groups of 20 or more. It's my sense that consensus groups often hamstring themselves by insisting that committees and managers conduct research and develop proposals that must come to the plenary for approval, one at a time. This undercuts enthusiasm for committee work (because everything is subject to revision by the plenary) and creates a terrific bottleneck in plenary (which must sprinkle holy water on too many things).

I think one of the reasons that this happens is because those with less power (influence) are fearful that delegated authority will make it harder to have their say, because it will take much more effort on their part to attend the dispersed meetings at which decisions will be made. This translates into a further erosion of their power and they want to hold onto what they have—often because their draw to be in the group in the first place was motivated, at least in part, by the desire to have more say in a world that is profoundly disempowering.


—Laird's Take
Delegation should be based on an assessment of skill, motivation, and availability relative to what is wanted from the position. (Note that this implies clear and complete job descriptions.)

That said, there is profound poignancy about how to balance: a) the need for efficacy, and for putting the right people in the right positions; with b) the deep desire for a more just and fair world that promotes decency and addresses the myriad ways that power is misused in the world. After a lifetime of experiencing hierarchy associated with abuse, it's not at all easy to sort the baby (healthy use of power) from the bath water (of structure being used to justify all manner of mischief in the name of efficiency).

• • •

In conclusion, I want to return to where I started: the tenderness of people committed to cooperative culture who are now in anguish about seeing the appropriateness for some degree of hierarchy.

Because I've never thought that a commitment to consensus and cooperative culture meant that delegated authority was a bad idea, I've not been finding any new nuggets when I sieve through the dialog. Nevertheless, I view this dialog as a sign of a maturing movement, where proponents are breaking out of a chrysalis that had them locked into one-size-fits-all equality. The prize here is a better quality for life for all, not reducing everyone to the least common denominator.

I think of this not so much as painful growth, as growing pains.