In a small, highly aligned team, collective decision making can be efficient. But as an organization scales up, consensus-driven business decision making becomes a bottleneck.
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In the modern workforce, consensus is treated as a virtue. We hire smart people, we value collaboration, and we want to respect everyone’s voice. So naturally, every decision should be made with complete alignment, right? Wrong. This kind of business decision making puts your organization at risk of careening off the rails like a runaway train—or, just as bad, of stalling on the tracks completely.
There are a few issues with an “all-in” approach to decisions in business. First, there’s the “yes man” risk. When buy-in is too broad, there’s a good chance that it isn’t legitimate. Does everyone actually agree, or are they just feeling the pressure to agree? Then there’s the question of efficiency. When every decision requires a council vote, you’re liable to get bogged down, foundering in choices without ever picking one.
Group decision making can be especially damaging for organizations trying to grow. Consensus works—until it doesn’t. In a small, highly aligned team, collective decision making can be efficient. But as an organization scales up (or if genuine alignment was never built in the first place), consensus-driven decision making becomes a bottleneck, eroding agility and grinding progress to a halt.
This doesn’t mean you need to run an autocracy instead of a democracy. There are ways to invite opinions without allowing them to overwhelm you.
Business Decision Making Shouldn’t Halt Progress
Organizations that scale successfully aren’t the ones that chase perfect consensus—they’re the ones that build clarity, trust, and empowered execution. Here’s what effective decision making can look like, even as your organization grows:
- Encourage input, not assertion: Everyone should have a voice, but not everyone needs to have a vote. Transparent discussions provide insight without creating decision paralysis.
- Decisions need champions. The best decisions come from those closest to their impact. A clear owner should synthesize input and move forward rather than wait for universal agreement.
- Push decision making to the edge: When no one knows who can make a call, they default to consensus-seeking or waiting for top-down directives that may never come. Empower teams to act with clarity and confidence.
- Bias for action, not endless alignment: More data won’t always make a better decision. Small, contained experiments drive progress faster than infinite deliberation. Rapid iteration and adaptability will always outpace slow, over-aligned execution.
The point of these measures is not to rush business decision making—a danger McKinsey identifies as being inherent to doing business in “the age of urgency.” It’s simply about streamlining the process and ensuring that valuable input doesn’t become a roadblock to progress.
Avoid the N-Factor and Allow for Exponential Growth
In math, N is infinite, with “N” referring to the natural set of numbers we know—unlimited and promising to stretch on and on. In organizational decision making, the N-factor promises only disaster. The strategies above allow organizations to maintain momentum even as they scale, which is essential to progress. Because if you’re stuck in a never-ending decision loop, you aren’t growing—you’re just running in circles, a toy train on a circular track that goes nowhere.
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