TL; DR: Clarity saves time. Consensus feels safer, but it’s expensive.
Clarity feels hard because it risks disagreement. Consensus feels easier because it avoids it. Instead of naming what’s there, leader hedge their views mistaking politeness for progress. Consensus becomes a way to obscure instead of decide so confrontation gets avoided at the expense of clarity.
I remember sitting with a team at LinkedIn years ago as they chased consensus. The conversation kept circling many good points. The problem was nothing ever landed. After a while, I interrupted and asked a question:
When you all can’t decide, who breaks the tie?
No answers, and no one looked anywhere in particular. Not at each other. Not at their engineering manager. Just silence.
That moment has always stuck with me. Not because the team wasn’t capable—they were—but because it revealed something important. No one had clarity on who was responsible for making the call. And without that clarity, the conversation could only chase its own tail.
Waiting for consensus often looks thoughtful or inclusive. In practice, it’s the quiet hope that if the discussion goes on long enough, someone will surface an argument that makes the decision obvious to everyone in the room. And I can’t name a single conversation where that ever happened. Can you?
There’s a danger here. When the decision is unclear, the more ambiguity sets the direction for what happens next. Theodore Roosevelt captured this best:
In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
I hear people say they want consensus, and I don’t think that’s quite right. Consensus isn’t bad, but it comes at a cost, and most teams don’t get much in return. What people usually want is to know they’ve been heard, and that if new information changes the situation, we’re willing to change course.
As Chris Voss puts it, “Yes is nothing without how.” Agreement without clarity doesn’t move anything forward. My point is that listening matters, but it must lead somewhere.
Clarity may feel uncomfortable, but avoiding it is far more expensive.
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This resonates. Self organizing teams promote teams making decisions without a management hierarchy but when there is lack of agreement who decides who decides? Prolonging a decision to wait for a consensus heightens tension. When it’s not clear who has authority to make the decision someone needs to step up and assume they have the decision making rights – product owner, tech lead, engineering manager, scrum master are all candidates – reiterate back what they heard so that everyone feels heard and make a decision. Only then can the team move forward and avoid decision limbo.
Interesting. “Breaking the tie” feels different to me than deciding to me.. Breaking the tie often leaves space for every opinion and waits to see what shakes out. Deciding is more deliberate, and it’s probably colored by my own experience watching leaders step in too quickly, instead of leaving the easier decisions with their teams.
Do you also see a difference here, Jamie? Or am I overthinking this?
Breaking a tie seems too much like picking a side..too personal. To avoid leaders stepping in too quickly I prefer the clear decision making approach of “this decision can’t wait for longer then x hours/days bc of [impact of decision delay]. So if the team can’t decide by then I will decide “