One of the most challenging new skills that agile teams need to learn is how to make team-based decisions. Decision-making is challenging even in the best of circumstances. Trying to balance speed of making decisions with the quality of the decisions and making sure all voices are heard is tough. Also, how do you keep everyone aligned with the decisions they made?
Another consideration is what kinds of decisions are eligible for team decisions versus individual ones? We wouldn’t want to have a team decision for naming a variable in a method for example. But we may need a team decision on the rules for naming variables. That rule is known as a policy. I contend that the team makes only policy decisions as a group. All other decisions are governed by those policies and made by individuals. My definition of a policy is a decision that affects future work or the team as a whole. For example, coding standards are a policy as is the plan produced during sprint planning and require team agreement.
The most important aspect of good team decision-making is a shared team goal. Without it, there is no basis for a team to converge on a decision that works best. Teams spend endless hours debating the merits of one idea over another, rarely reaching a satisfactory conclusion. A shared goal provides focus and a filter for decisions that help us better achieve our goal and those that do not. This is why Scrum calls for the Scrum team to craft a Sprint goal during planning to encourage the team to work together toward a common end during the sprint.
Once a team shares a common goal and/or purpose, now they need to figure out a decision-making process. There are several alternatives. Let me go over a few. First there is the “boss decides”. This has several advantages including speed, relieving the team from responsibility, and a clear path to a decision. It also has many challenges. Everyone has blind spots, including the boss, and having just one view and voice can miss out on important information. This method has the flaw of a single point of failure; if the boss is unavailable then no decision can be made. With the lack of team responsibility, there often comes a lack of commitment and drive. This style of decision-making rarely inspires a team and is best used in emergency situations where time is of the essence.
Another popular method is democracy, or “majority rules.” This is where we put decisions to a vote and the one with the most vote wins. This has the advantage of a clear preferred decision, everyone gets a voice (a vote anyway), and many people are familiar with it. Of course, this method can cause division in the team as people choose and advocate sides. Decisions are influenced by who is the best debater, authority figures can strongly influence the discussion before the vote, and peer pressure can lead to popular rather than good decisions.
Consensus is also a popular choice for smaller teams. Its chief advantage is you actually get agreement from everyone and they feel heard. The biggest disadvantage is it usually takes a long time to get everyone to agree. The larger the team, the longer it often takes. Most people who study true consensus go with the criteria that the decision is one that people can live with and support. This helps but still leads to debates over preference and subtlety rather than validity, and these debates take time.
The method I prefer is called consent. Consent seeks to expose and eliminate objections that would prevent us from achieving our shared goal. Once these “paramount” objections are removed, we can move forward with the decision and chosen set of actions. Consent-based decisions are best when the proposal includes a time limit for evaluation and a way to measure success. It is often easier for people to consent to try a policy for a limited time and check its applicability to the situation than consenting to a permanent decision. This works well with agility with its iterative nature of inspection and adaptation.
No matter which method you chose, all effective team-based decision-making requires good facilitation. Someone who can help guide the process through the various steps of describing the real problem, soliciting and exploring alternatives, and arriving at a proposal that the team can support for some period of time. Scrum has a role already in place that is ideally suited for this, the Scrum Master. One of the Scrum Master’s jobs is to help the team become self-managing and guiding decision-making is an important aspect of that.
In summary, for teams to effectively self-manage, they need to exercise good decision-making practices. This starts with a shared goal and to use a facilitated consent decision-making process for policies that affect their work. Draft these policies as time-boxed “experiments” that can be assessed and modified regularly. Finally trust team members to make tactical decisions themselves governed by the policies they consented to.
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