Distributed Decision Making & How to Get There
A flatter, more dynamic leadership structure will run circles around big, slow, top down organizations. But, that’s easier said than done. What’s an organization to do if it has shared leadership dreams?
Where Does It Work?
I’ve drawn Frederic LaLoux’s Russian-doll-like diagram on whiteboards in half a dozen countries to teach the upside of shared leadership. The outer ring of his diagram represents what LaLoux calls the Living Organism (or Teal) Stage in his framework, which describes the evolution of organizations through five stages of increasing complexity.
One of the defining characteristics of his most complex and capable organizational structure is their ability to execute distributed decision making.
The best teams in the world typically have higher leadership capacity across their ranks, are more flat structurally, and show agility in their expression of leadership.
What’s interesting about this claim from LaLoux, a consultant and author from Belgium, is that he’s not the only one that has arrived at this conclusion. SEAL Team Commander, Jocko Willink, declares that decentralized command is a signature of the highest performing teams in his national best selling book, Extreme Ownership.
Two minds from two different worlds agree: shared leadership outperforms top down management.
Why Does It Work?
Having distributed decision making means that more members of an organization are both capable and empowered to lead and affect change.
Distributed decision making increases speed of action. There’s less permission-asking and more action taking. We’re living in a technological age where there are less formal boundaries around when work is being done. If speed killed in 1950s business, it’s a hundred times more lethal in the 21st century.
Naturally, these shared leadership structures embody more personal responsibility. Members of these organizations can’t outsource their failures to others because they are following less directions and making more choices on their own.
As you can imagine, work and life are more meaningful when you have autonomy. Conversely, it’s hard to have agency and find purpose in your work if your “decisions” are decided for you.
If decision-making is an improbable capacity, distributed decision making organizations develop that capacity more broadly across their ranks, which ultimately makes for a rising tide that improves the quality of all team members. When diverse, unknown and unknowable challenges emerge, teams that benefit from diversity in their decision-making ranks more so than archaic organizational structures that constantly have few perspectives capable of making key decisions.
How Do We Get There?
While distributed decision making sounds progressive (it is) and high utility (it also is), it’s not something you can switch on. Distributed decision making only works as well as you have people worthy of making those decisions.
This is a development issue.
I often use the military as an example here because the imagery is so clear. Eighteen year old grunts in the military can’t even decide what hairstyle they want on their own, let alone what to do with their weapon. Special forces units, however, have extreme developmental processes that make their notorious freedoms on the battlefield possible. Yes, they can wear beards and long hair if they want (breaking extremely strict military norms), but they can also interchange who is making decisions as they walk through an enemy compound.
That type of autonomy is earned. Here’s the scaffolding needed for decentralized decision making:
Exceptional Capacity. Any decision making area is a craft. Having craft mastery and the pursuit of this type of excellence is how team members can be nimble across rigid roles and titles.
Remarkable, Aligned Taste. Taste is the guiding principle for defining what is “good.” The better one’s taste for organizational excellence, the more you can lean on their autonomy. If teammates know your organizational style when they see it, they can execute a team vision without being told.
“Ready to lead. Ready to follow.” This sub-motto used by the Navy SEALs is critical, because the nature of decentralized command is that someone is giving up control for others to take it. True leadership capacity is viewing leadership as exactly that: a capacity. You can use it and you can choose to subordinate yourself, too. Egos that cannot give up the feeling of control or subordinate themselves to others cannot operate in decentralized decision making well.
It’s time to reflect on decision making in your organization and what might be possible if more team members could take more responsibility than they are currently capable of (or allowed to). Then, you’ll need to consider what you will need to do to build that possibility!
TAKE ACTION:
AUDIT. Where is decision making centralized in your organization? For what choices are teams of people relying on one person to make decisions.
PRACTICE. What steps would need to make next month, next quarter, and next year to build the scaffolding listed above to have the option to distribute this decision making?