Decision Making Process

ONE|Boulder is both an organization in and of itself and is also the collective name used to describe organizations using a shared set of best practices to structure their operations. We call this the Unified Coordination System and is denoted as ”ONE|” prior to the name of a domain, as in ONE|Riverside.

Leadership Trine

Each domain, as well as ONE|Boulder itself, has a core management team of 3. This management team is being prototyped as three roles, Lead, Support & Safety. You can read more about these roles here. Within this management team, a consent model of decision-making is used. “Consent” is uniquely different from “consensus,” in which it is less about everyone’s opinions on “the best” way to do something and instead based on the opportunity to express any “paramount concerns”, meaning any aspect of a proposed approach that might negatively impact the underlying vision, mission, and values. Decisions are made with a beginning and end date and proposals move forward with a “good enough for now and safe enough to try mentality.” Rather than attempt perfection, which often leads to stalling and overplanning, consent decision-making is used to encourage agility and adaptability as an organization. We learn more by actively DOING and trying something on than allowing ourselves to be distracted and drawn into the minutiae of opinions and perfectionism.

Proposal Process

We use a proposal process to make larger decisions that impact others, outside of our personal responsibilities. Any member of a management team can make a new proposal at any time, so long as there is not currently a trial in place that already addresses that particular aspect of the project. The idea is to fill in gaps, not bring existing experiments into question (there is time for that at the end of the experimental window).

Stop! Why Stop?

We also use the cultural mechanism of “STOP - Why STOP?” from the fire service. Sometimes the proposal process for decision-making is not timely and/or the management team is not able to meet and invest the necessary time for a full proposal process. In these instances, managers are allowed to proceed as best able in the present moment, and the rest of the management team can call “STOP” if something is occurring that presents an imminent threat (paramount concern) to operations and/or team coherence. When something like this arises, it is the responsibility of all active participants and each individual to speak up and directly share what they are seeing.