Even Better than a Split Vote is a Mixed-Up Split

This month's Food for Thought is motivated by a US Supreme Court decision last week on whether routine collection of DNA samples from people accused of a serious crime is a violation of their right to privacy granted by the Fourth Amendment of the US constitution. Non-US readers that might have no interest in the specific issue: Hang in there. I will connect it to leadership and business. The justices of the Supreme Court were split on this decision. That is nothing unusual since the court is often split on major decisions.

The unusual aspect about this decision was that the split was not along ideological lines - conservatives on one side, liberals on the other.

Rather, Justice Beyer, a liberal justice, sided with the conservatives; and Justice Scalia, a conservative justice, sided with the liberals. They both had good arguments for their positions. The nature of that split prompted this topic.

Decision making in a commercial, for-profit, business environment, is a common theme for many of our Food for Thought articles.

We advocate decision making through delegation of authority to one individual, as opposed to by consensus or democracy of a group or by command from the top. In fact, we posit that if the best solution to a difficult decision becomes self-evident to all, then the organization and its leader might well be accused of procrastination - what might have been the best solution to adopt in the past is now obvious. By that logic, we argue that when difficult decisions are made in a timely fashion, half your staff should disagree with that decision. This line of reasoning encourages division of opinions amongst a group of people working together, i.e., split opinions should be encouraged.

However, in many organizations, the members align themselves into camps.

After a time, split opinions always find the same group of people in each camp. In business, such ideological steadfastness reduces the effectiveness of such organizations. Pretty soon, a leader emerges from each camp and the two leaders duke it out. The value of N independent opinions reduces to that of 2. Furthermore, the more often this happens, the more group-think begins to set in. So, as much as we argue that there should be a divided opinion on difficult decisions, we also argue that having the same division repeatedly is not healthy.

What is healthy is if a staff can discuss candidly and constructively, accept the fact that everybody will not be on the same side on major decisions, but repeatedly demonstrates a mixed group of people on each side. Such a staff will be more independent in their thinking and will accept the differences of opinions more readily, since it is not one camp against the other. So, even better than split decisions are mixed-up splits.

Food for Thought is our way of sharing interesting concepts on corporate leadership and management with others who might find it useful. The thoughts offered are intended to be controversial and thought provoking. They are intended to help our readers intentionally realize their potential, what we call Potentionality.