The Staff Engineer's Path

Take a tactic from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), whose principles of decision making famously reject “kings, presidents, and voting” in favor of what they call “rough consensus,” positing that “lack of disagreement is more important than agreement.” In other words, take the sense of the group, but don’t insist that everyone must perfectly agree. Rather than asking, “Is everyone OK with choice A?” ask, “Can anyone not live with choice A?” When IETF working groups make decisions, they’re looking for a large majority of the group to agree and for the major dissenting points to have been addressed and debated, even if not to everyone’s satisfaction. There may not be an outcome that makes everyone happy, and they’re OK with that.