Have you ever been on a project for years and it ends up feeling like the same things come up for discussion again and again, and every time everyone argues until the time is up, no decision is ultimately made and no action gets taken so it just inevitably comes up again?
This is usually not one of the big business-facing decisions. There are exceptions, but usually it tends to be a technical argument. Some technology the team wants to adopt or switch to or some changes they want to make to the code. The kind of thing where everyone agrees that something should be done, but no one can agree on the exact details. Management is even happy to allow it in principle. If only the team can agree.
You might consider this controversial, but I don’t think management by consensus and having committees take all decisions will always work. How often does it work? 80% of the time? 90% of the time? 99% of the time? You can argue over the exact split, but eventually there are things that start to pile up over the years. If you can’t make a decision 20% of the time, then you probably have bigger problems. But let’s say it is only 1% of issues that never get resolved. Over the years that 1% will pile up and it becomes all that remains.
Politics is a good analogy here. The laws that the vast majority of people agree on don’t get argued over. But after a few hundred years you end up with the few issues where there’s a near 50/50 split piling up and dividing a nation to the point where it feels like no one can agree on anything.
So for that remaining minority of decisions I don’t think the solution is to persue more discussion, more investigations, etc. Someone in the team has to have the power and the guts to take the initiative and just make a decision. Pick one option and go with it.
Continuing to do nothing is often worse than an imperfect solution.
