Decision Point: Multiple or Single
- Sep 5
- 8 min read
Updated: Sep 19
Article no. 1: “For 364 days out of the year most of the world lives and works in monarchies not democracies, because we don’t know the difference.”
Monarchy Thinking – Choosing one person to make the final decisions.
Democracy Thinking – A group of people collaborating to solve problems.
The first four Decision Points of democracy or monarchy:
I have a pet peeve. I am very much over the word “accountability”. Not because I don’t believe people should be accountable. I hold myself to high standards, and life is obviously better when others do too. No, it’s because accountability is used as a lagging indicator, a consequence that is executed with vengeful glee after all the damage has already been done. Accountability is one of the biggest sources of waste.
All this waste can be traced back to Monarchy Thinking’s heavy use of “deciders”. If there is debate, the monarchy and its delegates make the final decisions to return the teams to a single shared objective. It sounds like a great way to keep people on track and avoid wasted effort… but what if those decisions are wrong? Then somebody must be held responsible and fired!
If that were the only consequence, I would not care, but that is just the beginning of the waste. As a result of the firing, the work authorized by this exiting “decider” is often discarded. A new leader is hired, they share their new vision, and the teams are ordered to recreate their work under the new vision. Hundreds of workers now have to log the extra hours doing duplicate work under stressful timelines while they get yelled at by unhappy customers.
Maybe you’ve seen something similar? In my experience, “accountability” equals years of waste.
The Best of the Best
Accountability is leftover thinking from the past. Going back to our origin scenario from the first article, if a leader was wrong, he and his whole community might die. Worried about preventing their own death, leaders did not look kindly on those who failed. History is littered with failed members of the hierarchy who paid the ultimate price for being wrong.
The solution developed by Monarchy Thinking was competition. Think of a sports competition bracket. The goal is to identify “the best of the best”. Looking backwards from the end, we find the two best teams battling each other in the finals. Whichever team wins or loses, they both consistently had to win again and again to get there. In the semi-finals there were two losing teams and two winning teams. Going backwards another step in the past, each of those four semi-finalists beat four other teams. Before that, each of those eight teams beat eight other teams.
In terms of wins versus losses we get 8 teams with 0 wins, 4 teams with 1 win, 2 teams with 2 wins, 1 team with 3 wins, and 1 undefeated team with 4 wins. And when you count it up, in a bracket of 16 teams, the system of wins and losses produces 1 winner and 15 losers. In sports and business this encourages the 15 teams to work harder (in theory).
Perfectly fine for sports, but there is a flaw in using that metric for community and organizational leadership. In times of war that translated to 15 dead armies and 1 alive army. That’s a lot of death. Thankfully we replaced death with firing but there are still modern consequences. In order of severity: Ideas die (best case), projects end, companies are sold, or people lose their jobs (worst case).
In the world of entrepreneurship, the average success rate of small businesses that last more than 5 years is 10%. It’s very common for venture capitalists to analyze this 10% to see what strategies lead to startup survival. This is used to predict which 10% of companies to fund, and then seek a 10x return on investment to pay for the other 90% failed investments. What seldom happens, though, is counting how many of the other 90% of startups used the same strategies and failed.
In politics this same thinking translates into endless news show bickering, constant political attack ads, and blocking the passage of laws simply because the “other side” proposed them.
The belief of monarchy is that if we track winners and losers, we will create more winners. The reality is that BECAUSE monarchy tracks winners, it actually creates more losers.
Monarchy vs. Democracy Thinking
Because democracy thinks differently, it tracks an entirely different metric: The percentage of people who win. While monarchy thinking looks for winning leaders, democracy thinking searches for winning strategies.
In entrepreneurship, instead of finding the top 10% of startups to fund, democracy thinking increases the percentage of small businesses that succeed from 10% to 20% then 30%, etc.
In larger for-profit businesses, while monarchy thinking focuses on identifying who to promote, democracy thinking increases the percentage of projects that finish on time, or better yet the percentage of products that make a profit.
In non-profits and government agencies, while monarchy thinking focuses on elections won or lost, democracy thinking increases the percentage of people with fresh water, food, a place to live, jobs, a comfortable life, savings, the pursuit of happiness etc.
It makes “winning” irrelevant because it focuses on generating more winners. Can everyone win? Let me answer by saying that early in my career before I became a coach, my teams had a 100% success rate, year after year. (My biggest obstacle was usually gaining enough trust to get the project approved.)
Now when I coach teams, if I can join a team at the beginning of the project, they too can choose guaranteed success. For those who learn how to make “winning” irrelevant, a whole new world of choice, variety, and personalized happiness awaits.
When we shift our focus away from wins and losses, a new challenge appears: How do we define success? A “good job” with a “decent salary” for me might be different than what you consider a “good job”. A “useful product” for one category of customers might be useless to another. A legal policy may be a godsend for one citizen, and completely hated by another. What makes each of us happy is widely varied. In Democracy Thinking decision point #4 is about how to please multiple types of people in parallel, even when they don’t agree.
Step 1: Understanding Others
Personally, I learned the secret to new ways of thinking through acting. It’s not the only way, but it can be loads of fun! My favorite part was character work. (Stick with me, or skip to the last paragraph of this section. I promise I‘ll bring this back around to business and politics.)
Have you heard of this? We did exercises where we had to pretend to be animals. Step 1 was to go to the zoo (preferably) or watch videos of animals then reproduce their motion; Step 2 was to migrate to moving on two feet like the animal, an evolutionary hybrid (think of the Disney movie “Zootopia”); and step 3 was shifting to a normal human character that still kept the spirit of the original animal. We did the same process with the 4 elements (fire, earth, wind, water) and inanimate objects like springs, slinkys, stuffed animals, and other toys.
The point was to break us out of our habits and patterns. They were shortcuts to understanding people who are not like us. It’s easy to build things that we would enjoy. But it’s hard to build for people who are not like us. This is, of course, the definition of “bias”. Character Work is an amusing way to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes (or paws) and practice thinking and acting like someone who is not us.
If you don’t feel comfortable walking around on all fours, there are other techniques. My favorite is the Enneagram because it taught me how to build the most accurate and distinct characters. (Yes, better than Myers Briggs.) It’s the system I used to develop the characters in my business novel, “Shift: from Product to People”.
Step 2: Designing for Others
I’ll admit that designing for one persona is much easier, but it is only easier on us, and only in the short term. Our customers or constituents are still out there, in their multiple forms. When we don’t understand others we lose customers, drive away good employees, lose votes, and even create enemies. In the long run, a single solution does more harm than good.
When we don’t understand others we lose customers, drive away good employees, lose votes, and even create enemies. In the long run, a single solution does more harm than good.
One of the best solutions for this dilemma is Set-Based Design: exploring multiple solutions at the same time. It is actually more effective and cheaper than choosing one. How are four solutions cheaper than one? Like many of these techniques, it may seem counterintuitive.
Think about what goes into making a product: requirements, designs, engineering, test plans, documentation, training, marketing, and millions of dollars of equipment. Now imagine that we discover near the end that we made a wrong choice. As a result the product doesn’t work, nobody wants to use it, sales plummet, or all of the above. To fix it we have to redo requirements, designs, engineering, and test plans. We have to reorder equipment, retrain workers, and generate new marketing. The amount of rework is directly proportional to the time and cost of a project invested before the unknown is made known.
The amount of rework is directly proportional to the time and cost of a project invested before the unknown is made known.
Toyota (along with their mentor, W. Edwards Deming) found a solution. Their secret was to delay design decisions until the “last responsible moment”. They used this approach to eclipse American car makers in production speed and quality. You may also know about it under the names of the Toyota Process System (TPS) or Lean (Six Sigma).
My version of this approach comes in two parts: Tackle your Riskiest Unknowns first, and only do just enough work to answer the unknown. For most teams this entails working in an entirely different order. I call it “working backwards from the future.”
We might begin with understanding how the customer is going to use our (non-existent) product. This leads to techniques like “Frankenstein” prototypes, “Wizard of Oz” experiments, and “Minimum Viable Products” that take very little time, but allow customers to answer our questions.
Once we know what customers are asking for, we can build cheap hacks to verify what is technically feasible. This goes on and on, unknown decision after another, until the remaining unknowns have little risk of disrupting the final implementation of our product.
The same approach can be done by governments, businesses, schools, the arts, and more. It works with physical products, virtual products, and services. The building blocks are universal.
If you think this sounds like the source of your problems, contact me, and I’d be happy to schedule some free time to explore your unique situation.
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