Delegating desion making | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Rob Sandelin (floriferousmsn.com) | |
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2008 08:04:23 -0700 (PDT) |
It is my experience that small groups can work really well to delegate decision making. The key is communication and opportunity. Often only a small set of people care about or know about a particular issue. It can be a huge waste of large group time to have 3-4 people doing all the participating, while everyone else watches and yawns. For example, I once watched a large group spend two hours of its time trying to figure out the garden planting plan. Only a handful of people cared and several actually left after the first hour. Clearly the handful of gardeners should have just met and made the plan. If you do not have established teams to delegate to, set up a decision making meeting and invite all those who are interested to attend. The facilitator can easily establish interest by simply asking something like, It seems only a handful of people are working on this, would it be ok to move this to a separate meeting? Give the meeting clear boundaries, we are deciding the planting plan for garden, and encourage people to come, or contribute ideas to a designated lead person. But also make sure that people know this particular meeting WILL decide the issue and it will be done. It is important that decision making agendas of small groups get well communicated as it is a trust breaker to have something you care about decided at a meeting you didn't know about. Some groups are plagued with people with control issues, and those folks often complain that they have to go to too many meetings when things get decentralized. This is not a good reason not to let small groups decide things. Sometimes it can be appropriate to have a small group come up with a proposal for the large group to work with. Often however, this does not work well and the hard work of the folks who care gets nit-picked to death, sometimes causing those who care to bail with bad feelings about group meetings. Another idea is creating a process so that if a small group decision gets made which is widely objected to, say by 5 or more people, it is added to the next large group meeting by petition. There are boundaries to what kinds of decisions are large group or small group which will show up when a small group goes astray of the large groups interests. This is a normal part of the learning curve and over time you figure out what works best between large and small groups. Rob Sandelin Sharingwood Snohomish County, WA
-
Consensus decision making with and without a voting override provision Joani Blank, August 4 2008
-
Re: Consensus decision making with and without a voting override provision Craig Ragland, August 4 2008
-
Re: Consensus decision making Racheli Gai, August 5 2008
- Delegating desion making Rob Sandelin, August 5 2008
- Re: Consensus decision making Sharon Villines, August 5 2008
- Re: Consensus decision making Sharon Villines, August 5 2008
- Re: Consensus decision making balaji, August 6 2008
- kinship Elizabeth Magill, August 7 2008
-
Re: Consensus decision making Racheli Gai, August 5 2008
-
Re: Consensus decision making with and without a voting override provision Craig Ragland, August 4 2008
Results generated by Tiger Technologies Web hosting using MHonArc.