Posts tagged as:

agreement

A Wild Horse Called Chaos

by Steven M. Smith

Is chaos like a wild horse?
The root for the word “manage” is an Italian word that means “to train a horse.”
Inhumane horse trainers (managers) see a rebellious animal who must adjust to a new environment. They transform the horse through a process they call “breaking.” They break the will of the horse so it submits [...]

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Gradient of Agreement

by Steven M. Smith

I’m a big fan of Sam Kaner’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, ISBN 0-86571-347-2. I highly recommend it to anyone who leads meetings.
In my post on Decide as a Team, I wrote about using a method called Roman Evaluation to reach a decision. Kaner talks about a more formal concept he calls Gradient of Agreement in [...]

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Managing Low-Energy Decisions

by Steven M. Smith

Teams will take action on high-energy decisions. Action is less certain with low-energy decisions.
How do you detect a low-energy decision? What do you do about it?
After taking a deep breath, Emily said, “I propose that we create a monthly newsletter about our service offerings and send it to our clients.”
Her proposal responded to criticism from [...]

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I Won’t Stand In the Way

by Steven M. Smith

What do you do when a teammate says, “I won’t stand in the way of the team accepting the proposal.” and when asked directly whether they will support the proposal, they hem and haw without clearly saying “Yes.”?
In my post on Decide as a Team, I discussed how a team can use the Roman [...]

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Decide as a Team

by Steven M. Smith

Do some members of your team make agreements during meetings but fail to support them afterwards? If this behavior is happening, I suspect your team is using an obscure process to make decisions.
Identifying Obscure Process
An obscure decision making process is easy to identify. Ask each member to create a map of the process used to [...]

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Word Choices — We — Part 2

by Steven M. Smith

In my first entry about the word "we," I argued using the words "We decided to…" often create ambiguity. I suggested asking yourself several questions to reduce ambiguity either when you hear those words or when you are about to say them.
In this entry, I will lay out the case for when using the words [...]

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