Project Management: Collaboration vs. Consensus

Collaboration vs. Consensus

Pooling the hive mind is not the same as building consensus.

Any dynamic team has a wealth of collective wisdom, but pooling the hive mind is not the same as building consensus, one of the first lessons I ever learned about project management.

Everyone has a valuable opinion. Not all opinions can be accommodated. Whether it’s your plan, your documentation, or your methodology, there’s always something that someone on your team would do differently if given the chance. At the end of the day, you have to trust your process, especially if you’ve proven its effectiveness in past initiatives.

The same goes for your project stakeholders. And that’s where the pressure can really start to mount, especially for PMs new to project management.

My first major project involved six separate stakeholders. All of them were brilliant people who I liked greatly, and all of them had slightly different expectations about how the finished product would look and function.

That much is inevitable. Put six opinionated people in a room together and you’ll get six different answers. Unfortunately, I spent too much time and energy trying to finagle those six overlapping views into one coherent opinion—a.k.a., forcing consensus—when I should have been looking for the through-lines and the points of agreement and modeling the product on that basis.

Sometimes, as project managers, the best and most realizable objective is the elimination of pain points. Wish list items, if satisfied, can be cherries on the cake, or can be reserved for later builds.

And yes—I learned this the hard way. The timeline had to get extended, and that was on me.

But it worked out in the end.

Did the finished product satisfy everyone’s wish lists? No, but no product could have done so. Instead, it satisfied everyone’s top priorities, and eliminated at least one major paint point for every stakeholder. And guess what? Within a few weeks of deployment, everyone was satisfied, including the one or two stakeholders who didn’t get everything they wanted.

If given another chance, I would do it all differently. I can’t, so I’m sharing it here instead.