Decision Point: Prioritize or Plan
- Aug 4
- 10 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
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 the problems that affect them.
The first two Decision Points of democracy or monarchy:
Prioritize or Plan
Have you ever solved a problem, only to have that problem return months or years later, after you moved on to solving the next problem? Frustrating, right? This article is about why that happens, how monarchy thinking actually causes this phenomenon, and then how democracy thinking takes a completely different approach.
How Did We Get Here?
Given the scenario from article one, the community is facing a challenge they don’t know how to solve. The monarch has been chosen for having the “best” solution to the crisis. The monarch must now describe their vision to the people who will implement it. So, for the monarch, step two is describing the plan. This is why most modern day projects are required to begin with a scope, an estimate, a timeline, and a justification, even before any teams have been assigned.
But as we know, nothing ever goes according to plan. If the community already knew how to solve this problem, they wouldn’t have chosen a monarch. Because people don’t understand the whole picture, groups begin to unravel the work of others, and everything takes longer than estimated. The technical term for this is “dependent variables”. One thing that might vary is dependent on another variable that might also change.
Monarchy thinking solves this clash between variables by assigning one single decider to choose which variable takes precedence. But what happens when there are too many variables for one brain to track? Hierarchy. The monarch delegates variables to trusted allies and transitions to reviewing the decisions of the delegates. If there are any conflicts between the delegates, the monarch makes the final call.
The modern equivalent is KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). The VP of Sales is incentivised to increase profits. The VP of Marketing is incentivised around generating leads. The VP of Engineering is incentivised for new innovations. The VP of Quality is incentivised to protect against lawsuits. The VP of Operations optimizes margins through minimizing changes. The VP of Human Resources is supposed to keep all the workers happy. And so on. The goal is for all the divisions to collaborate on the plan while tracking their assigned metric. And if there is a conflict that cannot be resolved, bring it to the monarch to decide.
This often works as intended in smaller organizations, and at the upper levels of management. As we add more implementation teams, though, these teams are not designed to make decisions, but to follow the plan. If there is a conflict between teams, they run it up the chain of command for a decision, but that takes time. While they wait for an answer and in order to keep their jobs, the workers default to solving the assigned variable of their personal VP.
So every day, often without realizing it, people unravel the work of their peers, generate new problems, and create more work. This slows down the other teams, changes the estimates, and pushes out the deadlines. People do more work, but accomplish less. When the new work generated each day exceeds the backlog of existing work, the project stalls.
Every day people unravel the work of their peers, generate new problems, and create more work. When the new work generated each day exceeds the backlog of existing work, the project stalls.
Monarchy vs Democracy Thinking
Consider again the historical scenario in article one: a village is being attacked, people are dying, and stuff is being stolen. Since violence was being inflicted upon them, the village chose a monarch who understood violence. That monarch led their clan to war where it was not uncommon for even more people to die in battle and more possessions to be destroyed by the weapons of war. This also forced their enemies to get even better at doing the same, resulting in more death and more destruction. The monarchs, having been chosen for their solutions, did what they did best. They generated even more ingenious instruments of war to solve the problems that they created until eventually one side surrendered, was wiped out, or both.
After experiencing centuries of these doom loops, the pioneers of democracy thinking challenged this way of thinking. The original problem was that people were dying and possessions were being stolen. What is the value in implementing the plans of the monarch if our people are still dying and our possessions are still gone? What is more important, implementing the solution or solving the problem? What if instead of choosing the person who understood violence, we chose someone who understood how to make the violence stop?
What is more important, implementing the solution or solving the problem?
This is the story of Deganawidah (The Great Peacemaker) and Hiawatha (a great communicator) during the foundations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. As the story goes, they approached the most-feared warrior in the land. Everyone told them that he would never listen to talk of peace, but what they did differently was they listened to him. Then they went to the neighboring tribes and asked what they wanted for their people. They went back and forth, sharing the problems between tribes. Instead of designing solutions for their problems, they designed a method for discussing and resolving new problems as they arose. The confederacy of the Five Nations that they created in 1100 AD is still in operation today, almost a thousand years later.
Instead of designing solutions , Deganawidah and Hiawatha designed a method for discussing and resolving new problems as they arose. The confederacy that they created in 1100 AD is still in operation today, almost a thousand years later.
I discovered this path because as I shared in article one, I didn’t like politics. I ignored organizational boundaries. I got away with it because I was able to consistently complete in days what took others weeks, transform months to weeks, and reduce mutli-year projects down to months. Plus my teams enjoyed their work, products were stable enough to run for decades, we invented a bunch of new technologies, there were no lawsuits, customers were happy, and we kept expanding and winning new contracts. My goal was to solve everyone’s problems. To do that I had to learn to understand their problems.
Only in the past few years, as I’ve been testing these techniques in political organizations and communities, have I found a clearer language for this approach in the origins of democracy.
Monarchy thinking focuses on implementing solutions.
Democracy thinking focuses on solving problems.
Technique: Prioritized Epic Problems
So what does that mean to solve problems instead of implementing solutions? Here is how I do it: After many years of research, trial, and error I created my own technique that I call Prioritized Epic Problems.
It’s an alternative debate format where the 1st rule of debate is “No solutions.” By now you can probably guess why. The only thing you are allowed to debate is problems. So we create a single list of all of our problems. Where do we get our list? Preferably from decision point number one and listening to the people who want change, and to those who would be affected by those changes.
The 2nd rule of a PEP Debate is “Don’t make a higher ordered problem worse when solving a lower ordered problem.” This is the magic of the technique. In turn, people make proposals for moving problems up or down in order. We debate the proposal for 10 minutes, followed by a vote. Then the next person in line proposes moving a different problem up or down, and so on until we hit our time limit. When the debate is done, we will commit to solve as many problems as possible on the list, but if we find a conflict, the teams already know: “You can’t make a problem ordered higher in the list worse when solving a problem ordered lower in the list.” Where monarchy thinking provides a list of approved solutions, a Prioritized Epic Problems list empowers teams to create their own solutions as long as they respect the prioritized problems.
There’s only one more rule, and that is: “More voices”. Most of the time this means using a timer so that each person only gets 30-60 seconds, just enough time to speak one clear thought. Then they have to get back in line and let others speak.
Rules of a PEP Debate:
No solutions.
Don’t make a higher order problem worse when solving a lower order problem.
More voices.
I use this everywhere. I use it in politics, in organizations, and in personal life. I use it when there is a stalemate, when we want to design win-win solutions, when we can’t find a solution, and when we don’t know where to start. It’s a joy to watch. Usually in the first 15 minutes people are angry with each other and ready to fight. Then about 30 minutes in we start to hear, “While I don’t agree with everything you’re saying, I do agree with that…” By the time we reach our time limit everybody is collaborating and sharing new ideas.
From years of facilitating these types of conversations, the hardest part by far is separating problems from solutions. Since we are more familiar with talking about solutions, we often mistake solutions for problems. These are commonly expressed in the negative and only have one solution, “We don’t have <solution>.” A good problem statement enables multiple possible solutions. This leads me to one of my best points of guidance for identifying problems: “What would you like to see go away?”
Political Example:
Solution Thinking: We don’t have Single-Payer Healthcare. (single solution; says what the proposer wants, not what they want to go away)
Problem Thinking: Healthcare is too expensive. (multiple possible solutions; proposer wants healthcare to be less expensive)
Project Example:
Solution Thinking: This project must be completed by October 2025. (limited solutions; says what the proposer wants, not what they want to go away)
Problem Thinking: New regulations go into effect in October 2025 which will block our product from being sold. (more solutions; proposer wants to avoid a block on selling products)
Engineering Example:
Solution Thinking: We need to rearchitect the product to enable new features. (single solution; proposer wants the new architecture and new features)
Problem Thinking: We cannot build the following types of features with the current architecture… (multiple solutions; either the new features or the current architecture could go away)
Integrating Democracy 3.0 With Monarchy
What happens if we’re not on the road to democracy, if we work in an organization that has already chosen monarchy? In Democracy 1.x and 2.x, the entire system has to change, and that might be impossible. The power of Democracy 3.0 techniques are that they work, collaborate, and integrate well with non-democracies, including monarchies.
The power of Democracy 3.0 techniques are that they work, collaborate, and integrate well with non-democracies, including monarchies.
If we are working inside a monarchy or with other monarchy organizations, and we are assigned a plan to execute, the best way to get back on the path to democracy is to reverse-engineer the problems that led to the creation of the plan. (This is what I do with every new project, whether I am joining at the start of the project, or mid-stream.) When we ask the leaders about the problems that they wish to solve, we are returning to democracy step one, listening. Leaders usually welcome these questions, because it shows that you care about their point of view, their goals, and what they are trying to accomplish. It’s usually a win-win outcome.
In some cases the leader might not want to talk to us, but in my experience that only happens in a minority of cases. If it does happen, though, this may be because as monarchy thinkers they believe in the hierarchy. They may see us as multiple steps below them. If so, we can try working our way up the hierarchy.
We start by making a list of our best guesses of the problems to be solved. Then go down the hierarchy and ask the implementation teams, “What problems could be created while trying to solve any of the problems on this list?” This gives us the information to run a Prioritized Epic Problems debate with the implementation teams.
Then we go to our immediate leaders and ask, “Is there anything on this list of problems that you would like to change, or are there any problems that we should be solving with the project that are not on this list?” If they have changes or additions to our list, have a Prioritized Epic Problems debate with the leaders, update the list of Prioritized Problems and review the updated list with the teams.
Then we can join forces with our leaders (and their peers) to approach their leaders and ask the same two questions, “Any changes? Any additions?” Keep going as far up the hierarchy as possible, conducting Prioritized Epic Problem debates at each level if you can.
The secondary benefit of this approach is that if anything was misunderstood or not communicated at any step in the hierarchy, asking together gives our leaders a chance to learn alongside us, but while saving face. They get to be seen as helping their employees to learn.
No matter how far we get, I can guarantee that we will always be better off than when we began. Every team who has ever done this process has learned something useful that they didn’t know before they began.
If you’d like to know more about how to run a Prioritized Epic Problems (PEP) Debate, send me a message.
What’s Next
What are your favorite techniques for better understanding problems? Please share in the comments. Think any of these Democracy 3.0 techniques like Prioritized Epic Problems would be helpful in your organization or community? Book a Call.
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