Reduce transactional overhead and don’t grind the system to a halt

Some people do everything by committee and consensus.

They want to ensure others are included in their decision making. They listen carefully to what everybody has to say about everything. And allow their personal networks to weigh in on their buying decisions big and small, often in public, via social media or other digital communication platforms.

Naturally, the compassionate part of me appreciates the collaborative and inclusive spirit of this way of making decisions. Unlocking the wisdom of the crowd can be a wonderful thing. It seems to allow for a diversity of input and assure people’s voices are heard.

Now here’s how I really feel.

Committee and consensus are expensive, exhausting, wasteful, stupid and disempowering. Most decisions do not require careful analysis, seventeen opinions, detailed research, a plan of implementation, an evaluation spreadsheet, a clear set of objectives and a postmortem meeting to find out what went wrong.

This process introduces an abundance of what the computer programmers call transactional overhead, which grinds the system to a halt.

Particularly within teams at organizations, there’s a strong undertow to make every decision by committee.

But the reality is, it almost always bogs down business operations. It makes it impossible to be nimble. And worst yet, it eliminates clear line of responsibility.

One of the mantras our startup lived by for many years was, just press send. That was our way of reminding each other, look, whatever is on your mind, don’t overthink it. Stop waiting until the planets are aligned. Don’t design by committee. And definitely don’t suck every single goddamn employee on the payroll into your vortex of indecision for the next forty minutes.

Use your best judgment, just press send, and move on with your life.

What’s amazing about this philosophy is, it shifts the mindset from anxiety, perfection, fear and approval; to a mindset of speed, calmness, compassion and trust. It significantly reduces transactional overhead and keeps the system fluid and nimble.

The number of amazing projects individual people shipped by just pressing send far outweighed the ideas our executive team spent months debating in a windowless conference room.

The hard part about this philosophy is, you’re fighting against the safety in numbers theory. There’s this evolutionary mechanism inside of our caveman brains telling us that by being part of a larger group reduces the likelihood of accidents or attack. Redistributing a decision to a larger crowd keeps us out of danger.

Because in the pack we feel less vulnerable.

The wolf can’t eat me because I’m blending in with all the other chickens in the coup. The group is my haven and my shield, and there’s no way I’m going to just press send without running this idea by my entire team first.

Have you ever been in that situation before? I’ve lost count of the number of times it’s happened in my life, both personally and professionally.

From choosing a place to get coffee to selecting a vendor to redesign our website to picking a location for our annual awards banquet, it makes my neck break out in hives to remember all the moments when people tried to make decisions by committee and consensus.

Christ on a cracker, somebody please choose something. We’re all reasonably intelligent and trustworthy people, so whatever anybody selects will be fine.

I promise you. Nobody will know the difference in the final result anyway. Even if the outcome is twenty percent better or worse than if we had deliberated for the next half hour, it ultimately won’t matter in the end.

The only thing that counts is that people learn to let go, trust themselves and each other, feel empowered, take ownership and have real agency over their lives. That’s far more important than allowing a dozen employees across four time zones to voice their opinion over what color the stupid fucking flyer should be.

Yellow. The flyer is yellow. Period. End of discussion.

I don’t care if green is the new black, I don’t care if pink represents friendship, affection, harmony, inner peace, and approachability. Moderation for this thread is permanently closed.

Ultimately, the two questions we need to ask ourselves, both individually and organizationally, are these.

Where in your life are encumbered by layers of bureaucracy, decision by committee and mountains of red tape? And to what degree are you responsible for enabling that behavior?

If you want to reduce your transactional overhead and not grinds the system to a halt, just press send. Don’t let the undertow get you.

Whom are you afraid to trust with their decisions?