by Serguey Shinder
For five months I sat on an internal group that met every fortnight to decide which messaging technology the company would standardise on. Twelve people, an hour each time, and between the meetings I wrote three papers. The last one ran to nine pages and compared operational cost, failure behaviour and what we would have to retrain. I would guess forty hours of my own time went into it across the summer, a good deal of it in evenings, because I cared about the answer.
In October the standard appeared as a two page document on the intranet. It named a product neither of our two shortlisted options had included. It had been agreed by a director and a vendor's account manager, and the first any of the twelve of us heard about it was the same as everybody else in the company heard about it.
My first reaction was about process and it lasted a week and was completely useless. The second reaction was the one worth having, and it arrived when I went back through five months of my own notes looking for the moment somebody had said who would decide. There was no such moment. Nobody had ever claimed the group had the decision, and nobody had ever claimed it did not. I had assumed it, for five months, on the evidence that people kept asking me for papers.
That is the whole mechanism and I think it is very common. Being consulted feels almost exactly like having authority, from the inside. The meetings are the same meetings, the work is the same work, you are treated seriously and your objections are written down, and there is no moment where anybody tells you that none of this binds anyone, because nobody is lying to you. They genuinely wanted the papers. The papers were good. They were input to somebody else's decision and that was always what they were.
What I do now takes about a minute and I have never once regretted it. Before I commit real time to a group like that I ask two questions. Who signs this off, by name. And what changes if I disagree at the end. If there is a name, I know what I am doing and I do it properly. If nobody in the room can answer, I write my opinion once, send it to the person I believe is closest to the decision, and stop attending. Twice now the answer to the second question has been an honest nothing, which is fine, and saved me a season.
The other half of it is that I now say the name out loud when I run something. These are the people advising and this is the person deciding and it is me. Nobody has ever been offended by hearing it. Several people have visibly relaxed.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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