Note: This is a little interim post on the topic of my Oct 2023 book called Collective Power. I will bridge the topic back to my current book project Wiser Organizations at the bottom.
Making choices
A perfectly planned meeting is great. We line up the agenda items, and appoint someone responsible — the meeting is a walk in the park.
But some things we can’t plan. Because not everything is predictable. We might hear a report and discover a big issue. We might want to make a decision but get stuck in the middle.
Then, we find ourselves in a detour. The hardest situations are when we can’t know whether a detour will be worth it. For example, if we’re brainstorming ways to save money, and someone has an idea for a new revenue stream. Is that the magic solution or a distraction?
In those cases, we need to decide together what path we might take. Which risks are we willing to take?
In Collective Power, I show a few common traps:
Topic drift: when we get off topic.
This is very common. Someone wants to drift off topic — but we remind them and all is well.
I am biased towards rounds here — with rounds, it’s much more likely to stay on topic because we don’t do the bouncing off each other as much. In rounds, it’s not unusual that someone gets off topic and the others just get back on topic again.
Regardless, a facilitator’s reminder goes a long way here.
We may or may not agree to get back to our original topic. If we don’t, we escalate to a fork.
A fork: we have to decide between two topics to talk about.
This pattern arises when it’s not clear which topic we should be talking about. That can happen when there are two competing ideas, or if half of the group says something is outside of a topic (= a topic drift) and the others say that it’s on topic.
Even worse when we disagree on which one to talk about and we tie ourselves into a simple dependency. (image from Collective Power)
A fork always happens when someone has a counterproposal. Instead of talking about a topic, we are now talking about two topics (the original proposal and the counterproposal) — which means we need to talk about which topic to talk about.
That’s why counterproposals are annoying. They increase the complexity of our meeting management and make collaboration harder.
A simple dependency: we need to solve an issue before we can continue on our original topic.
This pattern arises when we realize that we can only answer A after answering B.
This is typically not hard — we press pause on A and deal with B. Then we return back to A.
It is hard in groups that don’t have follow-through beyond one or two meetings; for example, if a group only makes instant agendas or doesn’t have a parking lot (backlog) for unaddressed topics. With a backlog, we can put A on the list for the future and put our attention on B. Then we come back to A once we’re ready.
Circular dependency: A depends on B and B depends on A and we’re checkmate.
A regular dependency is easy if there’s only one dependency: we pause A and go to B, then back to A, because B depends on A.
But in a circular dependency, we can’t do that because not only does B depend on A but also A on B. And now we’re stuck. We can’t make a decision on A because we don’t know the answer to B. And we can’t make a decision on B because we don’t know the answer to A.
The only way out of that pattern is to go in small increments and go back and forth until we have enough clarity on both. (In the spirit of clear enough, explored enough and good enough.)
Doing so requires serious skills. The more complex our task, the more we will tie ourselves in knots.
Meeting management and attunement
While my book Collective Power deals with the patterns of solving issues via governance and explicit facilitation, the prevention lives more in the implicit realm — which I will look at in Wiser Organizations.
We don’t need as much governance if we trust each other — attunement can take the place of governance.
This matters significantly in topic management. For example, a circular dependency requires a lot of trust — because we need to trust each other to approve half-baked solutions along the way to inch in an upward-spiral into more clarity.
But there’s more. Prioritization depends a lot on factors beyond explicit governance or strategy. And prioritization plays directly into topic management — and topic management becomes really hard when we don’t agree on what topics are important.
Governance isn’t only about rules — it’s also about finding a rhythm and a dance with each other. It’s about fluency and literacy so our processes flow well and without too much effort.
And that’s the connection between Collective Power and Wiser Organizations. In a perfect world, we don’t need much governance — we can run on attunement only and turn into a group of all-knowing, mind reading empaths. But since that’s unlikely, we will probably have to do both — be and stay attuned without governance, and then use governance seamlessly when we do need it.
Ironically, that’s my goal: teach governance in such a good way that people need as little of it as possible.
