The 12-Week MBA Chapter 18: Deliberating and Executing - From Discussion to Action

Your team just spent two hours discussing three options. Everyone has an opinion. Nobody agrees. Now what? Most teams have no plan for this moment, and that is exactly when things fall apart.

This is post 20 in my 12-Week MBA retelling series.

Chapter 18 picks up where chapter 17 left off. You have defined the decision, explored your options, and gathered data. Now you need to actually pick one and make it happen. The authors walk through three ways teams close decisions: consensus, majority rule, and the sole decider. Each has strengths. Each has traps. And none of them matter if the team cannot execute afterward.

Consensus: The Beautiful Lie

In the authors’ leadership training simulations, teams almost always claim they made decisions by consensus. The authors observe otherwise. Consensus is the decision-making equivalent of saying “I am fine” when someone asks how you are doing. Everyone says it, nobody really means it.

Why do people love consensus so much? It sounds ideal. If everyone agrees, the decision must be good, right? And everyone should be fully committed to it.

The problem is what happens on the way to consensus. Because any single person can block the process, people start trading favors to get buy-in. “OK, we will go with Jane’s strategic plan, but only if Tom’s department gets a 10 percent budget increase, Dick gets a promotion, and Harriet gets to implement her plan next year.” The result is not a clean decision. It is a grab bag of compromises that nobody is excited about.

Even when the team avoids that kind of horse-trading, consensus has another problem. It pushes teams toward safe, obvious decisions. The ones where everyone can easily agree. That means the more interesting, creative, and consequential decisions, like launching a new product or hiring someone unconventional, never happen. They are too controversial for everyone to agree on.

And there is a third problem. If a consensus decision turns out badly, who is accountable? Everyone agreed. So nobody is responsible. The team cannot learn from the failure because there is no one to coach or hold accountable.

Majority Rule: Quick but Messy

Majority rule solves some of the problems consensus creates. It is faster. No need for everyone to agree. A vote cuts through the endless discussion and horse-trading. When a situation is genuinely uncertain and people just disagree about the future, sometimes the best thing to do is vote and move.

At least a majority of the team will be committed to the decision. That is better than a decision the majority opposes. And in a crisis where you need to act fast, a vote can be the quickest way to get the team moving together.

But majority rule has its own weakness: accountability. If things go wrong, who is responsible? The majority? That is hard to act on. You cannot really coach “the majority” to make better decisions next time. And the minority who voted against may spend the execution phase saying “I told you so” instead of helping.

The Sole Decider: Star Wars Edition

The third option is the simplest. One person decides. Everyone else provides input, but the final call belongs to one person.

The biggest advantage is clear accountability. If the decision works, that person gets credit. If it fails, that person can be coached, reassigned, or removed. The organization can learn and adapt.

The authors make a point that surprised me: being freed from decision-making responsibility can actually be empowering. When you know you will not be held accountable for the final choice, you feel safer proposing wild ideas. You can throw out something unconventional without worrying it will come back to bite you. This can push the discussion into more creative territory.

There is a common belief that sole deciders are faster than groups. The authors push back on this with a great reference. They bring up the Star Wars prequels, where Emperor Palpatine’s whole pitch is that he will bring order and speed by replacing the slow, bickering Galactic Senate with one-man rule. The authors point out this is not necessarily true. A quick up-or-down vote does not take much time. And plenty of solo leaders are terribly indecisive.

What takes time is not the final decision moment. It is the earlier work of exploring options and gathering information. And that takes the same amount of time whether the boss decides alone or the team votes. A sole decider who skips that phase and just issues a decree might save time on the decision itself. But they will spend just as much time (or more) afterward explaining their reasoning to the team, which was not involved and does not understand or agree with the choice.

Agreement vs Alignment: The Restaurant Problem

Here is one of the most useful ideas in this chapter. The authors separate two things that people usually mix up: agreement and alignment.

You and two friends want to eat dinner together. You will never agree on a restaurant. One wants sushi, one wants pizza, one wants Thai. But you can easily align by flipping a coin or playing rock-paper-scissors. As long as you all agree the process is fair and binding, you all show up at the same restaurant and have a great time.

Agreement is about everyone wanting the same thing. That is often impossible. Alignment is about everyone moving in the same direction. That is realistic.

So how do organizations get alignment without agreement? The naive answer is carrots and sticks. You get paid to execute decisions. You get fired for refusing. End of story. But the authors say this is too simple. Even if you could buy people’s enthusiasm (which you usually cannot), the cost of doing so would be enormous. Companies that can get alignment without expensive incentive schemes have a competitive advantage.

Why Process Creates Legitimacy

The real key to alignment is legitimacy. People will execute a decision they personally disagree with if they believe the decision was made legitimately. This is one of the most important ideas in the chapter.

Sociologist Max Weber identified three sources of legitimacy:

1. Charisma - People follow because the leader’s personality is compelling. “I will do it to please you.”
2. Tradition - People follow because it has always been done this way. “Who am I to reject the wisdom of our forebears?”
3. Procedure - People follow because the decision came from a fair, known, content-independent process.

In modern organizations, procedure is the strongest source. A decision is accepted as binding when it comes from a process that everyone knew about in advance and that does not depend on who is making the decision or what the decision is about.

The authors share a great example. One of them sat on a nonprofit board where the managing director was fired. The obvious replacement was Alan, the CFO, who had been there over a decade and was trusted by everyone. They could have just appointed him. Instead, they searched for two other candidates, put all three through the same interviews and evaluation process, and then chose Alan.

Was that a waste of time? The authors argue it was essential. Because the process was legitimate, nobody questioned whether Alan was the right choice. He was able to implement uncomfortable organizational changes without resistance because the way he got the job was beyond reproach.

Compare that to Peloton, where CEO John Foley put his wife in charge of the branded-apparel division. No process. No independence from the personalities involved. No legitimacy. That decision contributed to eroding confidence in Foley from shareholders and employees alike.

Different Decisions Need Different Processes

So which method is best? The authors say the most important thing is to have any clear process at all. Almost any process beats no process. Without one, teams fail to share information, miss creative options, reach unclear outcomes, and struggle to execute.

Beyond that, different situations call for different approaches:

Routine decisions usually have data to work with. Over time, one person on the team becomes the expert in a particular area. That person can decide alone with input from others. A sole decider works well here.

Setting team norms and rules requires consensus. If the team is going to accept future decisions as legitimate, everyone needs to agree on the process itself. You cannot have a legitimate majority-rule system if the majority imposed that system on a minority who never agreed to it.

Crisis decisions happen under deep uncertainty. Nobody can predict the outcomes. A majority vote is often the fastest way to get the team committed and moving forward together.

The Process Guardian: The Thankless Job That Matters

The authors introduce one more role that most teams overlook: the process guardian. This is the person who watches how the team is behaving and calls a timeout when the group drifts away from its own rules.

The process guardian is not the same as the team leader. It can be split into subroles. The timekeeper makes sure meetings stay on schedule. The moderator manages the flow of discussion, including enforcing rules like the round robin from chapter 17.

The authors also share a technique their own leadership team uses. Before each meeting, they label every agenda item as one of three types: inform, discuss, or decide. Items meant to inform do not blow up into full debates. Discussion items do not spiral into premature decisions. Decision items get the full treatment.

But here is the honest part. Being a process guardian is a thankless job. Everyone is comfortable in the content of the discussion. The guardian keeps pulling people out of that comfort zone. They tell the loud people to quiet down and push the quiet people to speak up. Nobody loves the person who does this, even when they do it well.

The authors offer three fixes:

1. Make it a formal role. When someone is officially the process guardian, their interventions are not taken personally.
2. Show appreciation. The role is emotionally taxing. Team members need to actively support whoever takes it on.
3. Rotate the role. The best way to appreciate what the process guardian does is to do it yourself sometimes.

And when internal dynamics make it hard for any team member to be the guardian, bringing in an outside moderator can help.

Key Takeaway

The way you close a decision matters as much as the decision itself. Consensus sounds ideal but creates horse-trading, safe choices, and zero accountability. Majority rule is fast but blurs responsibility. A sole decider provides clear accountability but still needs to involve the team to get commitment.

The deeper lesson is that alignment matters more than agreement. You do not need everyone to agree with a decision. You need everyone to accept it as legitimate and execute it with discipline. And legitimacy comes from process, not from charisma or tradition.

Pick a decision-making process. Make it known. Follow it. And designate someone to make sure the team actually sticks to it. That is how decisions get made and executed in the real world.

Book: The 12-Week MBA by Nathan Kracklauer & Bjorn Billhardt | ISBN: 978-0-306-83236-9

Previous: Chapter 17 - Defining the Decision

Next up: Chapter 19 - The Power of Dissent - Why disagreement is a feature, not a bug.

Part of the 12-Week MBA retelling series