10 August 2024
"Yes, I agree, we absolutely need to rewrite that core part of our system, but we just can't get Paul to give his blessing to do it. He wrote the first version, you know, and so long as he remains here at the company we're probably never going to convince him it desperately needs a rewrites, no matter how many times it crashes." Frequently the path to accomplish something at a company is to draft an idea and pass it out to all the involved parties. Only when the entire group (dare we call it a "committee") agrees on the solution can it move forward into execution.
On the surface, this approach seems to make sense: If a particular decision is going to affect someone(s) outside of the individual(s) making the decision, it only seems right and fair to include those affected individual(s) in the decision-making process. And since it often feels autocratic for someone to make a decision without complete agreement from all parties concerned, it very quickly turns into a policy of unanimity: Only when the entire group agrees can the decision move forward.
However, this quickly becomes, in of itself a bottleneck: Because the entire group must agree, the decision-making now becomes vulnerable to a peculiar form of blackmail that I call, "Biggest Jerk Wins Syndrome", or BJWS. (NOTE: I often substitute a different work for "Jerk" there, to make the acronym BAWS. I'll leave it to your imagination from here.) In this situation, an individual realizes that without their "thumbs-up" vote, the decision cannot move forward, which provides them with tremendous leverage over the whole of the group. They can either hold up the proceedings entirely, or else use their leverage to win concessions at a far disproportionate value out of the rest of the group. (I once witnessed somebody wrangle both a promotion and an agreement to begin an entirely unnecessary new project out of a decision to upgrade to a new version of Java.)
Why does this happen so frequently? It stems back to a fundamental fear in management--the paranoia of being wrong--and so by making the decision a shared one (i.e., we have to gain consensus), in the event it turns out to be an incorrect one, we spread the blame out across everyone in the group that unanimously agreed to make the decision. It is, literally, a hedge move against the possibility of being fired in the event the decision turns out poorly.
Tags: management antipatterns