The Making of a Decision - Part 1

This series goes over the topics described in this talk.

Just shy of 30 years ago, I had a great opportunity that might have changed my life, at least in terms of education and work opportunities. The decision, ultimately outside my control, didn’t go my way. I’ve come to understand my family’s reasoning better with time, but it was hard to accept. Programming helped me reclaim a sense of agency. I was able to create something out of nothing while being in control of all decisions.

As I’ve worked on bigger and more complicated projects with added difficulty and bigger teams, making anything becomes harder. After all: Coordination is not free; the more systems (of software or people) need to interact to make change, the higher the cost.

Decision-making is an essential part of building systems, and people dynamics come into the fold, no matter how much we want them. Decision-making is an activity that involves a lot of people, in all types of organisations.

“These decisions are a record of the power structures and the feedback loops that got it there.” -Andrew Harmel-Law

Very often, crucial decisions deviate from expectations and this has a negative effect. Why is that? This led me to examine what makes a decision happen.

To make decisions about their systems, people generally need sufficient context on their software and people systems and the capability to change those systems somehow. Speaking in imprecise terms, one could say that this is all about knowledge and power.

In my experience of learning and talking about it, power is uncomfortable to discuss but essential to understand: learning about power is essential to be effective, to be taken seriously and to not be taken advantage of.

There are two key definitions of power:

Power With (Mary Parker Follett)¹: “The ability to make things happen, to be a causal agent, to initiate change.”

Power Over: “The ability to make others do as you would have them do.”

Sources of Power

I found the treatment from the book “The Dawn of Everything” most complete and relatable. When transposing the ideas about sources of power from the book over current organisations,we might end up with:

Authority: In organisations, this manifests as economic coercion rather than physical force. It’s the power to fire, demote, or economically punish employees. It can manifest in access control. HR departments and security functions institutionalise this form of control, creating systems of compliance through the implied threat of economic harm.

Charisma operates through leadership appeal, inspirational vision, and personal influence networks. This manifests in leaders who can motivate and direct others through force of personality, compelling vision, or personal magnetism, regardless of their formal position in the hierarchy.

Access to Knowledge appears as information asymmetry and expertise-based authority. Senior management controls strategic information, financial data, and decision-making processes that employees cannot access. Experts wield power through specialised knowledge, whilst administrative systems create bureaucratic gatekeeping around information flow. This mirrors bureaucracy as a form of control over information as described in “The Dawn of Everything”. Knowledge hoarding can become a tool for maintaining hierarchical advantage.

Laws of Power

There are many books with titles such as: “The n Laws of Power” or similar; they tend to be books about exercising influence, which can be useful. What I’m looking for when I read about the laws of power is understanding why and when power flows. So far I’ve found this to be a useful set.

• Power is dynamic. One thing you know for sure is that it will keep changing.
• Power is like water. Eric Liu’s metaphor of how power is like water and your organisation is the sponge is very memorable. More from Eric on this:

  ”.. power is like water. It flows all around us at all times. Sometimes it takes the liquid form of politics-in-action, a turbulent flow with crosscurrents and strong undertows. Sometimes it takes the solid form of settled law: policy is power frozen. Sometimes it is like vapor in the air, invisibly shaping the climate and our behavior in just the way beliefs or ideology or emotions do.” – You’re More Powerful than You Think. A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen By Eric Liu

• Power compounds: If you have power you tend to get more power. Small exercises of power create capacity for larger ones.

I hope you enjoyed this first part of “The making of a decision”, the next post will be about knowledge. If you have any comments or questions please reach out via my social links

1. Read more about it in Dynamic Adminstration, a book that collected the works by Mary Parker-Follet ↩