The Value of Consensus

Building consensus within your team, business or with stakeholders is vital to achieving a goal/project, etc. If you're going to have drinks with friends, all of you must agree on the bar or restaurant. In a football match, all members of the same team have a consensus which is to win the opponent.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw first hand the value of building consensus within a team. No one can tell me otherwise; without consensus on any project, that project has a high chance of failure.

My story..

So, I began work on a new data architecture on AWS that will see our digital products perform better, smarter and ready for big data warehousing & streaming analytics. Architecture was sweet on paper (miro) but during execution, you'll most likely hit some roadblocks which happened to us anyways. While discussing the design and plan with the engineering team (and of course, getting more ideas), I felt the push backs through body language, tones, etc. I wondered what I might have missed in this process. Voila, there was no consensus on the plan and how the products and APIs were going to interact with the databases. What a miss in the entire execution plan.

Without thinking twice, I had to double back and get everyone involved. Why was this important? the engineers who built these products need to understand why there is a major change in the data architecture, the benefit to the overall business strategy, the guaranteed improvements to reporting and analytics which is our core business value. Building consensus with the engineering & product team was the highlight of the project. New ideas kept flowing and the plan was much better than what I put together before.

Key take aways for me;

• Collaboration & consensus build morale,
• Brings people/teams/organisations together,
• Opens up new channels for communication,
• Creates a shared understanding,
• The win is sweeter...and more...

The need for consensus can not be over emphasised. But note, collaboration is different from consensus. Collaboration does not require consensus.

Collaboration means working together toward solutions, pooling talents and ideas, and recognizing both successes as a team and the specific contributions of members. Consensus is a team's unanimous agreement on a decision. ref: opensource

Hope this piece helps you understand the value of building consensus.

Cheers

AE.