The Risks and Benefits of Coming To Consensus

I recently received an e-mail asking what I thought about adding 16 new people to the alpha review list for a e-learning course. The idea was to get a wide variety of opinions from people from around the organization and around the globe. To be inclusive and ensure that the course would be well received by the global audience for which it is intended. This is a group that likes to work by consensus, and they wanted to bring that culture to this project.

Now personally, I’m a big fan of consensus. I love talking a problem through with other people until a solution presents itself out of the chaos. In this case, though, the intentions behind the push for consensus and the realities of this approach, turned out to be very disconnected.

Get the team to feel a sense of ownership and pride in the course, so they will be more likely to promote it.

A lot of the edits that were submitted were ultimately ignored, because they didn’t line up with other comments. There was (as one would expect) a lot of discontinuity between the sets of edits. For example – one person loved the color scheme, another person hated it. Whatever we do with that information, somebody is going to think (correctly) that we disregarded their input. Where that happened on content points, the project runs the risk of having enemies, rather than advocates.

Make the decision-making easier.

Consolidating edits from all those people adds a whole lot of work and effort, and that’s before you even get to the decision making. And, at the end of the day, someone still has to write and approve the actual words that will be used. On balance, the approval process took longer and more effort even for the final decision-maker.

Despite the risks and the frustration factor, I still believe it makes sense to work consensus into the creation of e-learning solutions. To do so effectively:

Get consensus as early in the project as possible. Get consensus on the goals and objectives of the project. If people have different goals in mind, it’ll be impossible for them to agree on tactics. Since it’s World Cup season, I’ll use a sports analogy – if you don’t agree on which goal you’re shooting at, you aren’t going to agree on which direction to run.Recognize when you or your team is trying to use coming to consensus on how to describe a process as a way to come to consensus on the process itself. When the process, product or policy you are training people on is new, it is likely to take a lot longer to come to consensus. Plan that time into your project, because you will end up using ig.Decide where consensus is worth the cost. Consensus takes a lot of time to achieve. It’s worth taking the time for the big stuff. But when it comes down to deciding every single word in a course, as long as the words convey the appropriate message it’s probably not worth the time to come up with the perfect phrasing. As much as it pains me to recognize this, the words we craft with such care are often skimmed with much less attention to detail by our learners.What experiences have you had trying to come to consensus on a course? What tips do you live by when planning your projects?

Tags: Consensus, Review

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 2:58 pm and is filed under learning design, project management of learning solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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