“Tell me what you want, what you really really want!” I have always been fond of this line from the first Spice Girls hit single. In fact, in my keynotes, I sometimes quote, or even “sing” that line from the smash hit Wannabe, released in mid-1996 – but that’s a different story. Fact is: Most entrepreneurs, managers and CEOs are unable to articulate what they really really want.
Once you inquire seriously with company owners, executives, managers, it usually becomes clear that their ideas are fuzzy about what they, individually, truly want. Which is likely one of the big reasons why organizational change seems hard, why business language is so often bloated, boring or clichéd – and somewhat estranged from reality.
Things get harder if we are merely groping around in the fog. If we don’t actually now what we really really want, then, more often than not, our actions will betray our words. If we knew what we really really want, on the other hand, there would be a serious, and probably surprising advantage to businesses: We could dispense with pretty much all corporate decision-making, for good.
If you know what you want, then you don’t have to decide
Decisions are an outcome of sloppy wanting. If your motivation is clear to you, if the direction in which you want to head is clear to you, then nobody needs to decide a thing. Then all else in business and in life is derivation from that wanting, is consequence, is merely following through with what you really really want. “If you need to decide, then you don’t know what you really want.”, the great Ernst Weichselbaum taught us. “If I come to a signpost that says Rome and Moscow and I know I want to go to Rome, then I don’t have to make a decision there. Only if I don’t know where I want to go do I have to decide.”
I recently watched a Netflix show called The bombing of Pan Am 103, in which we repeatedly see groups of volunteers from Lockerbie who stubbornly insist on doing what’s needed, regardless of what the paid professionals – policemen, administrators, spies – think of them. Everyone’s baffled by those Scottish volunteers, especially the Americans involved, who, of course, glorify being “rational”, “reasonable” and “individually responsible”, but consistently fail to get swift results and to derive satisfaction from it. They end up feeling guilty, most of the time. Those volunteers from Lockerbie, however, just get things done and achieve healing.
In decentralization, which is what we in the BetaCodex Network have been promoting for ages, teams and actors who know and feel that something must be done just “go for it”. Like those Lockerbie volunteers. That is not to mean that they blindly “follow their gut feeling”. Instead, it means that there is supposed to be a depth of understanding about what the direction is – and about what is right and wrong. They don’t have to decide. They just know and make choices accordingly.
Imagine systems of wanting – instead of systems of meetings, decisions and learned helplessness
At the same time, decision-making by managers is also a symptom of excessive centralization. Every time I start working with a new consulting client, the organization is used to having plenty of meetings. Everybody among the managers has a full calendar, with days densely rhythmicized. There is a feeling of busyness, pressure, haste and breathlessness. A few weeks into the transformation towards decentralization and Beta, and especially once the Cell Structure Design goes live, 40 to 60 days into the OpenSpace Beta chapter, most meetings cease to happen. the constant decision-making fades a way. Not because anybody says so, but because the need for constant decision-making stops. But because strategy is transformed into clarity, meetings give way to conversation, hesitation is supplanted by immediate consequence.
This cannot work without a system of Relative Targets, though. There needs to be transparency of each and every cell’s income and cost. There needs to be Fast Closing of the books on the first or 2nd day of each month, and relative reporting serving all teams. The needs to be complete absence of budgets, steering and fixed targets. All of this, combined, will create an environment in which teams cannot overlook what should be obvious everywhere: That work and the game of business is about achieving continuous profitability, while making clients happy and having a good time doing value-creating work, overall. Business then becomes the business of business again - rather than pleasing of bosses, the meeting of numbers and making decisions. The sprit of "reaching targets” will fade away, for good, giving way to well-paced working on value creation and business problems.
Don’t meet. Work together
One common misperception around management is that “meetings” are supposed to lead to consensus and decisions by managers (or “holders of positional authority”). That conception is wrong, and on several levels. Put shortly: In Alpha, or centralized command-and-control organizing, meetings lead to the wrong people gathering for the wrong reasons, in order to talk about the wrong things, in a profoundly flawed way, and attempting to accomplish things they shouldn’t attempt at all. As we have all experienced, this leads to too many meetings, to meetings that are too long, to too much presentation, too little effectiveness and – by and large – utter waste of time. One of my clients used to have half-day meetings every Monday, in which around 17 people (or 25% of the company’s total staff) were gathering, and nobody could say what they accomplished. It was an astonishing waste of resources. But it seemed “normal” to those involved, of course.
All this leads to predominantly bad decisions and demotivation. But what’s the alternative?, you might ask. Do people meet in Beta organizing, a.k.a. decentralization and consistent self-organization? Sure they do. But not to decide or reach agreement - in short, “to have meetings”. Instead, they come together to discuss and debate, to consult each other, or to get things accomplished together (“work sessions”),
In Beta, meetings among managers happen pretty rarely, and they happen mostly for critical reflection around information made available ahead of the gathering - never during the meeting itself. This matters: In Beta, presenting to each other while gathering is considered poor style. As a golden rule, such gatherings are never about decision-making – but about discussing and clarification. So that decisions may be made by individuals with appropriate mastery and authority, afterwards.
Don’t decide. Agree
To decide is neither a privilege, nor is it something to be proud of. It is a symptom of neglect of wanting, and of failure to really really want. That failure is ever-present in Alpha organizing. In Beta organizing, by contrast, the constant need to make decisions is frowned upon. Here, agreements among actors who posses both mastery and authorization will lead to coherent action, which is valued higher than decision-making. Which is considered a form of posing, anyways. In a decentralized organization that’s focused on value creation, there is an understanding that agreeing is hard, that deciding is soft (and often in vain). Decision-making is considered lame.
As an overall rule, decision-making should be the exception, and not the daily business of managers, as which is all too often perceived. When choosing is necessary, then decisions should be made by people with masteries that are a good fit for the specific problem to solve, after careful consultative process. Decisions should never be left to be taken by people who carry “the right positions.”
In the light of this kind of reasoning, the aim of better decision-making through AI - an often-repeated claim or hope these days, seems nightmarish. If AI should lead to us want even less and to want less daringly, then AI may indeed become the downfall of humanity. We need more less decisions and more human wanting in organizations. We need less meetings and feeding of algorithms to arrive at joint direction. We need less accountability and more proper responsibility.
The alternative to decision-making is having orientation yourself and providing orientation to others. A good organization is set up in such a way that no decisions are necessary.
Don’t be weak. Instead, gain clarity about what you really really want. Then go for it.
I think the Rome example assumes away the thing that makes decisions necessary.
Knowing Rome is the destination is already the consequence of a prior decision. More importantly, real organisational choices rarely look like Rome vs Moscow. They look like: Rome faster but at greater risk, Rome cheaper but later, or Rome now at the expense of another equally legitimate commitment.
Purpose can provide direction and constraints can narrow the choice space. Neither eliminates trade-offs between legitimate alternatives under uncertainty.
Good design can eliminate unnecessary decisions and push bounded judgement closer to the work. It cannot eliminate genuine trade-offs. Someone, somewhere, still has to decide what gets sacrificed.
If the same decision keeps recurring, that may signal weak design. Having to make a decision does not.