Consensus or voting, which one do I use?
A lot of day to day activities within product management are about gathering and analyzing information. Information such as: your products potential market, your company’s strategic direction, competitive intelligence, your company’s capabilities and core competencies, resource availability, market trends, problem statements, business opportunities, requirement and feature status, etc. Most of us have a hard enough time gathering and managing this information that we don’t even have a chance to ask, “What do I do with it all?” If you haven’t gotten to this point… you will. If you have I am sure that you came to many answers, one of them may have been “to use the information to make decisions or selections.” So my next thought is if most of the activities that we are engaged in can all be used in one form or another to influence decisions and selections, a natural next thought is to study the selection process.
I recently talked with a Product Marketing Manager whose role was among many things, to select which out of the hundreds of proposed projects (products, or roadmaps in this case) his company should sponsor. We spent the majority of time focusing on selection criteria discovery and definition, but eventually I would have lead him a little by asking who else on his team makes the final decision. I am sure that he would have said that his team works together on the selection, but ultimately it was decided by him.
When products and projects fail there are always many reasons. Often it easy to point out that a major reason for failure was that change adoption was not addressed. Change adoption within the company developing the product and change adoption within the market that product was influencing.
Would anyone argue that when your team decides to go with your opinion you usually support it? Better yet, make sure it is successful, live it, defend it, go the extra mile with it? And when the team decides to go with something that you think is wrong how easy is it for you to give that same effort and focus? Depending on how much my Product Marketing Manager wants his team and company to be on board will really determine if he wants to come to a consensus or come to a vote.
A consensus is where the team looks at all of the rationale behind each position, and comes to an agreement on what the right approach is, because each person sees how one position is being selected, and agrees that that method of selection was the best method. A vote is where the arguments are given, and then the group with the most people in agreement wins. There is one thing that a vote will always create that a consensus will not… a minority. What are your thoughts? What are some more reasons and situations for consensus vs. vote?
Read “Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together.” Consensus sounds great, but it doesn’t work. Consensus is really a power mechanism. Voting sounds wonderful, but it doesn’t work either. The people that vote no do not change their minds just because the group went with a yes. And, power controls the vote. Groups can do things that nobody in the group wanted to do, or would have done alone.
Alignment works, but it requires a lot of effort.
However a decision is made, it is made in a manner consistent with the culture of the organization. I’ve done change management in an organization where you couldn’t communicate with the IT managers of other departments even if you worked for the CIO. Nuts! But, that was the way they did things.