I'm a boss type guy and I absolutely do this intentionally but not because it's not really me setting policy as much as I'm focus group testing. I run it past peers or a few influential people who could be receptive. Get them to to think about it and give some feedback. When I bring it up to the group it's because it's been well-received and the other influencers are ready to back it. Similar to how this article explains it.

Yep exactly. If you go into a meeting and you haven't talked to at least a few of the people there about the topic beforehand, IME it's not going to be a productive meeting. I usually start with getting feedback from one or two subject matter experts, building consensus with them, and then slowly expand my circle of people I get feedback from, until we have "the big meeting". Having a "big meeting" with no pre-established context usually wastes everyone's time.

Also known as: consensus driven decision making

Bias through established group-think.

It’s easy to criticize, but the reality is that making decision with and motivating large groups of people involves tradeoffs that lead to theoretically suboptimal outcomes.

I feel like everyone savvy just does this because they understand the consequences of not doing it and the clueless people always just bitch about there being so much office politics. In my experience it's just the communication protocol that works.

It's not so much politics as it is the fact that no one likes surprises, particularly not your boss or your boss's boss. Almost every major people-problem I've had to sort out in the past year has been a result of someone not getting buy-in from their team or superiors before proclaiming a major change. Change is good, everyone wants you to make your awesome improvements, but you're not a cowboy. You have to engage the people who will be affected by this change, collect feedback, and address any concerns that are surfaced.

They like to delay the surprises.

What about 1) false negatives (when they receive it poorly), 2) various consequences of priming, 3) false positives (where they receive it well and everyone in main group wrongly assumes they are alone in their doubts)?

You can totally run things in authoritarian manner, gathering consent in instrumental way and use outside sources (like sales) for validation. But downsides/side effects/intentional features not said out loud are well known and researched to the point where one has to intentionally choose to remain ignorant of them to sustain a different narrative.

I do lean on my own instincts. I won't just give up on an idea because someone doesn't like it. They need to convince me. I'm just open to being convinced. But I'm also just wrong sometimes anyway. It's not a science.

For me that is a huge part of it - a combination of focus grouping while I'm refining my thoughts as well as getting people used to the idea. That way, even when things are presented as options, I'm confident that they'll choose the option I want.

The other key aspect is that it's just far more efficient. My last few jobs have espoused being highly collaborative, but in practice what that means is that everyone winds up in the proverbial room. Chaos ensues, nothing ever gets decided.

Meetings should be about consensus. Not hashing things out. Senior folk have experience, and that reduces options to a few. Pre-meeting helps narrow that down further.

So at the meeting, only hitches to the (expected) plan are expected. Not building a plan from scratch. Its more like a standup than a bull session.

Thats why it is often hard to follow a meeting! Often they mention acronyms and concepts without bothering to explain them. So it is just a setup because decissions were made in advance, so why do they bother to hold these big meetings? I mean all these commoners could do something productive instead.

Manager Tools has a whole pot cast on how to pre-wire meetings

https://files.manager-tools.com/files/private/podcast/mp3/ma...

That’s called an oligarchy in politics. Can’t say it’s a great operational model

It makes sense where you have a lot of stakeholders. Would you ever debate an approach to doing something in front of a customer?

Likewise, if a meeting is where you adjudicate something, you need consensus to focus on the key issue, whatever that is. Otherwise, you’re likely to head into some rabbit hole that results in no decision.

No, We’ve already discussed this and we think your approach is wrong

You've probably noticed that there aren't really any successful companies that are run as democracies. There are good reasons for that.

There still is a semi-democratic process (barring large-scale network effects for the sake of discussion): whether a given person chooses to become (or stay) a customer. People vote for or against a company’s products/services with their money.

Co-ops?

Co-ops are usually a republic, not a democracy. People still have specific roles, and those roles have authority to make specific decisions without getting a majority vote for that decision.

I don't know enough about co-ops but it seems to me they not only redefine the power structure, they also redefine what success (for themselves) is and the means to reach it. Unfortunately ou can't directly compare the two.

A word of advice, injecting such topics needlessly distracts from the actual point you’re trying to make.

Unless the discussion is about slavery, in which case, fair enough.

You're assuming it's the small group of people who make the final decision without additional input. Just because a smaller group of people refine and vet an idea, doesn't mean they force it on everyone else.

The problem being solved is that most ideas are not good, so any single person with an idea looks to vet it among a trusted group of advisors/peers. If this group is too large, it's hard to deal with the noise, too small and it may kill or ok an idea when it shouldn't be.

After refinement with the smaller group, an idea now has enough substance to bring to the larger group and hopefully not waste their time.

A simple example this process helps avoid would be pulling together the full group, presenting an idea, and then legal killing it with their first comment. Everyones time was just wasted since the idea as presented had legal issues and needed more refinement.