Understanding the Dynamics of Consensus 🤔
The question of where consensus is valuable and where it impedes product development is a nuanced one. At its core, consensus means a general agreement among a group, but the journey towards that agreement can either drive success or lead to stagnation.
An Exploration into Consensus
Consensus: a word that implies harmony, agreement, and collaboration 🤝. In the realm of product development, it’s a critical and complex component that can either make or break a project 💔.
How do we strike the right balance?
Let’s delve into this fascinating subject 🕵️♂️.
Defining Consensus: More Than Just Agreement
Understanding consensus is essential before dissecting its role in product development 👀.
Let’s take a closer look at what consensus really means.
General Agreement: Consensus isn’t about everyone thinking alike but about finding a common ground that everyone can support 🌱.
Entrepreneurial Mindset: Entrepreneurs often accept higher risks, making decisions based on experience and data, even when the likelihood of failure is high 🎲.
The Product Owner’s Dilemma: Decision-Making in Volatile Markets
Product owners, akin to mini-CEOs, navigate volatile markets and must decide when to use consensus 💼. This decision-making journey is fraught with challenges and opportunities. 🌟
Dynamic Markets: Fast-paced and changing, markets require swift and sometimes unilateral decisions 🏃♀️.
Risk Appetite: Entrepreneurs accept risks beyond the conventional 70% success metric. They seize opportunities, often relying on instinct and experience 🦸♂️.
Balancing Act: Consensus vs. Quick Decisions
The path of product development is a tightrope walk 🎪. Striking a balance between collective agreement and swift, intuitive decision-making can be the key to success 🔑.
Consensus through Leadership: CEOs or product owners garner support through trust and a vision that others can believe in 🙌.
Consensus through Collaboration: On a micro level, teams must find agreement through discussion and convergence of ideas 💬.
The Facilitation Journey: From Idea Generation to Consensus
The process of facilitating consensus is akin to navigating a ship through turbulent waters 🚢.
How do we ensure that the ship reaches its destination intact?
Expanding Ideas: Initially, a plethora of ideas are generated, creating a vast ocean of possibilities 🌊.
Convergence: The challenge is to steer these ideas toward a single point of consensus, ensuring everyone is onboard 🧭.
Avoiding the Death March: Ensuring everyone believes in the project avoids scenarios where projects are doomed to fail from the outset ☠️.
The Importance of Building Trust: A Foundation for Consensus
Building trust is an integral part of gaining consensus 💖.
How is this trust built, and how does it facilitate decision-making?
Credibility through Success: By proving that your decisions lead to positive outcomes, you build trust and create an environment conducive to consensus 🏆.
Inclusive Decision Making: Including everyone in the decision-making process ensures that even if an idea isn’t universally accepted, the consensus can still be achieved 🌐.
How-to Advice: Building Consensus, the Right Way
Achieving consensus effectively requires tools, techniques, and a nuanced approach 🔧.
Let’s explore some recommendations.
Recommended Reading – “Never Split the Difference”: This book provides insights into negotiation and consensus building, applicable in diverse scenarios from hostage negotiation to bedtime discussions with kids 📚.
Facilitation Techniques: Techniques to navigate through the “groan zone” of disagreement can be critical 🛠️.
Thinking in Bets: Accepting that decisions are made with incomplete information, akin to playing poker, is vital 🃏.
The Imperative Nature of Consensus
As we reflect on the journey through consensus in product development, it’s clear that it is not just a desirable element but an imperative one 🌟.
Varied Routes to Consensus: Whether through leadership or collaboration, consensus is crucial 🗺️.
Adapting to Circumstances: Recognizing when to seek consensus and when to make a decision is an art and science, contributing to the successful evolution of a product 🎨🔬.
In conclusion, consensus, while always valuable, manifests differently depending on circumstances. Embracing this complexity can lead to richer, more nuanced product development 💡.
Question is where is consensus valuable? Where does it kill great product development? And I think that’s a really interesting topic. Consensus just means general agreement, right? That everybody generally agrees. And sometimes getting to agreement is the right way forward. But also, conversely, sometimes making a decision is the right answer.
But trying to split that and figure out how, in what circumstances you want to make a decision based on consensus and what circumstance you want to make a decision based on, you know, we’re making a decision and we’re going this direction, it’s something that is very much at the heart of the complexity of being a product owner, right? If you think about the product owner as a mini CEO or an entrepreneur, right, we’re perhaps operating in a highly dynamic, highly volatile market, and things can change quite quickly.
And sometimes if we want to take advantage of opportunities that are floating by, we need to just make a decision and go for it. And as long as we’re… Oh, what’s the… I usually an organization is generally an organization is willing to make a financial bet on seven percent success, right? That’s the general… It’s a good bet if it’s 70 as a success; it’s a bad bet if it’s less than that.
But people that are entrepreneurs tend to accept a much higher degree of risk than that 70, right? That 70 is like bricks and mortar organisation; that’s what they look at in other financial departments. But for an entrepreneur, you see an opportunity and you have a gut feel, right? And usually, it’s not really a gut feel, right? It’s based on your experience and the data that you’ve got, and you’re making a call.
But yes, I’m going to invest in this idea. But if you’re familiar with startups, 50 of all startups fail in the first year, and 70 of the rest fail in the first five years. So you’ve actually got a really small chance of success from being an entrepreneur. So to be that entrepreneur, you have to be continually making decisions, trying stuff, failing, making stuff, trying to stop, failing.
What was the… What’s the bad Edison quote? I know it’s a bad quote; he didn’t… I don’t know, I’m sure he 100 said this, but the consensus quote, right? That is probably wrong, is that he said, “I didn’t figure out how to make a light bulb; I found 99 ways you can make light,” right? Because it took a hundred tries at something to get that one thing that worked.
99 things. So that’s the mind of the entrepreneur. That’s the difference between a big organisation CEO and an entrepreneur is the amount of risk they’re willing to accept in the endeavours that they’re trying to achieve. Yeah, look at Elon Musk buying Twitter, right? That’s a really high risk of potential failure. But if you disrupt enough and change enough and keep changing until you get to those ideas, that’s that entrepreneurial mindset.
So that in the product owner as an entrepreneur can work at the small scale as well as the bigger scale. If you look in the Scrum Guide, right, it quite explicitly says everybody must respect the product owner, right? The product owner’s decisions that they made. And part of that is because sometimes we have to move quickly. That’s one. Sometimes we just have to try stuff, even if we’re not 100% sure it’s going to be successful.
So you might be making a decision to try something even though lots of other people think it’s a bad idea, right? And that’s where you have that piece of… It’s not about consensus; it’s about just making the decision and moving forward. But on the other side of that, you’ve got the times when you do want to get consensus.
Because it’s very difficult to do stuff when the people that you need help from to do stuff believe you’re wrong, right? If they believe you’re wrong, they’re not going to help, right? Entrepreneurs kind of sidestep that by building a group of people around them that are supportive of their vision so that when they do have to make decisions, that people are like, “Really? We’re going to go that way?”
“Oh, you know, Leslie, the CEO, the entrepreneur, Leslie’s like, ‘Yeah, this is the way we’re going.’ They’re like, ‘Okay, we trust you; we’re going to move forward and go anyway,’ right?” That’s how they get support for that. So you’ve got people that support you. So that’s not really consensus, but it kind of is. It’s that other type of consensus where it’s lead consensus, right?
But you have another type of consensus where you… And this is more facilitation idea of consensus or at least convergence, right? It doesn’t have to be consensus, but it’s convergence. And that facilitation idea, and I don’t mean just a facilitator, right? This could be the product owner; this could be the Scrum Master; this could be a team member.
This could be in a video; you’re trying to brainstorm ideas for your family vacation, right? It doesn’t matter what it is, but you have this initial expansion of ideas, right? When you ask a group of people, “How might we solve this problem?” We’re going to generate, hopefully, right, lots and lots and lots and lots of ideas.
So we get this big buildup of ideas, and then you want to get to what’s the thing we’re going to try? What’s the thing we’re going to do? But there might have been 15 different options. How do we not only get to the thing we want to try but gain a moratorium of consensus so that everybody’s behind the thing? Because if people aren’t behind something, it ain’t going to happen, no matter how awesome it is.
It’s not going to happen if the people are not behind it. That’s why I feel a lot of projects fail, is that there’s no attempt to get people behind it. They’re just told what to do. So you end up with those… I don’t know if you remember in the old traditional days, you had death march projects.
And a death march project is where every single person that’s working on it knows that it’s not going to work, right? They know in their bones that it’s not going to work. So what happens? It doesn’t work, right? But somebody thinks it will work and keeps going towards it, spending the money, but nothing happens. You want to avoid that.
And I think this building to consensus is getting everybody behind the idea, even if they don’t necessarily think it’s the best idea, right? That’s for me is building consensus around that story. So this, to get back to the original question, right? Where is consensus valuable, and where does it kill great product development?
It doesn’t… It’s always valuable, but how you achieve it is different depending on your circumstance. If you’re the CEO, you gain consensus by creating an environment where everybody trusts your decisions. They’re far… They’re willing to go along with and are happy with your decisions because they know the chances of you being successful are fairly high because you’ve built a level of trust with them.
That’s consensus through leadership. But then you’ve also got consensus through collaboration, right? We’re collaborating together as a group. We want to generate… This is usually on the macro scale. The CEO is making the decisions on the big, on the macro scale, and then on the micro scale, you’ve got lots of little decisions that have to be made by the team.
Lots of things to try, lots of things to do, and you need those ideas and then consensus. And you have to navigate that growing zone in the middle, right? That’s usually what it’s called, the drone zone, where stuff’s just… You know, nobody agrees on anything. And you have to, as a good facilitator, even the CEO has to do this, has to figure out we’re going to generate a bunch of ideas, and then I have to get it down to what it is we’re going to try that everybody’s willing to get behind.
I’ve had more consensus behind so that it moves forward and it has the possibility of being successful. So I think consensus is absolutely imperative to all aspects of product development, but there are different routes to achieving it depending on the circumstance, right? You might have fast-moving stuff where you have to make decisions and people trust you.
But how do you build that trust in the first place? Well, you have to do all this other stuff to gain consensus in the other way that people… You know, you get them behind it because you get them to agree to be behind it, even if they don’t think it’s the best idea. And then, oh wow, that was successful. You just gained credibility to then make a decision and have people support it.
So I think it is absolutely imperative, but it’s also important to think about. I really recommend there’s a book, Mike Voss’s book called “Never Split the Difference,” right? And I think that’s a fantastic story about how you create that. Where are we going without needing to have a bunch of people that are unhappy with the outcome, right?
So the way I think his little description is that whether you’re negotiating, because it’s all a negotiation, right? Collaboration, whether you’re negotiating with terrorists for hostage release or you’re negotiating with at bedtime for kids, right? It doesn’t matter; the same rules and techniques apply, right? You’re trying to get that consensus that yes, this is the right way forward.
Yes, you should go to bed now. But if they’re unhappy, you know, they’ll go into their bedroom and they’ll go under the covers and get the flashlight out, and they’ll read their book anyway, right? Or whatever it is, they’ll try to not do the thing. So building that consensus is absolutely imperative.
But I really recommend “Never Split the Difference.” I recommend looking at facilitation techniques for navigating that growing zone to get consensus. And also, another awesome book, “Thinking in Bits,” for those entrepreneurs, right? Building products is like playing poker, right? You don’t have all of the information all the time, but you still have to make decisions.
So how do you navigate that data analysis and then make the best decision possible based on the information that you have and being consensus along the way? Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else, Agile, Scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
