Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on March 7, 2008 - 2:14pm.
I am making the assumption based on my epxerience, that in most organizations, management at the execution level tends to use Consultative decision making rather than consesus decision making. Consultative decision making, in my opinion, helps especially because businesses are living on the edge of leading technology and to reach consensus to make a decision in such a case, it will take a lot of time and hence to loss of window of oppurtunity to act.
Also, I am not sure the team is aware of all the information for the best informed decision making in consesus decision making. Especially a team developing a sub-system of a super-system, or a development team that delivers to a manufacturing team, is not aware of the business case. In this scenario, a scrum team's consensus based decision making will not be right. Here again consultative decision making may be better.
Also, consensus based decison making, in most cases spends time in resolving or mitigating the differences of the minority. Generally, in an organization, ability of a team member to make the decision and make it stick depends on the authority, trust, respect or combination of the 3. Of the 3, authority appears to solve the problem faster (in time), especially with the organization cultural value of "disagree and commit" (a give-away phrase for where I work). This again can be achieved by consultative decision making easily and also leads to faster decision time.
Just to note from the article, the article has left the question of inefficient decision making with respect to time through consensus based decision making unanswered. But this is the crux of the probelm, especially because technology changes fast and hence organizations have to be on their toes. They cannot be spending time in consensus building, but in action, be it right or wrong. And the right or wrong decision making will be better made in consultative decision making.
I am making the assumption based on my epxerience, that in most organizations, management at the execution level tends to use Consultative decision making rather than consesus decision making. Consultative decision making, in my opinion, helps especially because businesses are living on the edge of leading technology and to reach consensus to make a decision in such a case, it will take a lot of time and hence to loss of window of oppurtunity to act.
Also, I am not sure the team is aware of all the information for the best informed decision making in consesus decision making. Especially a team developing a sub-system of a super-system, or a development team that delivers to a manufacturing team, is not aware of the business case. In this scenario, a scrum team's consensus based decision making will not be right. Here again consultative decision making may be better.
Also, consensus based decison making, in most cases spends time in resolving or mitigating the differences of the minority. Generally, in an organization, ability of a team member to make the decision and make it stick depends on the authority, trust, respect or combination of the 3. Of the 3, authority appears to solve the problem faster (in time), especially with the organization cultural value of "disagree and commit" (a give-away phrase for where I work). This again can be achieved by consultative decision making easily and also leads to faster decision time.
Just to note from the article, the article has left the question of inefficient decision making with respect to time through consensus based decision making unanswered. But this is the crux of the probelm, especially because technology changes fast and hence organizations have to be on their toes. They cannot be spending time in consensus building, but in action, be it right or wrong. And the right or wrong decision making will be better made in consultative decision making.