How Not to do it.

Winter seems to have backed off for the time being. The snow has melted and warmer temperatures (warmer for November anyways) have returned. Which is good, because I didn’t get my leaves raked until this weekend. I was worried that I was going to have to pick up the leaves in the spring, which would not be a fun job.

At the Fire Hall, we’ve been planning out the annual Firefighter’s appreciation dinner. I think that the appreciation dinner is a really nice event. It gives us the chance to bring our families and spend some pleasant, social time together, and we get a nice meal and a feeling that our time and effort is, well, appreciated.

In the planning stages of the dinner, a vote was requested from the members of the department. After the vote was taken, the decision was overridden, and a different option was selected – the one that had been indicated as a preference before the vote.

Now, I don’t really care about the option that we choose here, but what really concerned me was that this seemed to combine the worst aspects of top-down and bottom-up decision making, pretty much guaranteeing that nobody would be happy with the result, and potentially negating the morale boost that the appreciation dinner normally provides.

As I talked about before, voting is a pretty standard method of bottom-up decision making, with all the risks and benefits involved in that method. If you put something to a vote, you’re likely to get a result that is supported by the majority of the personnel, but you have to be willing to accept the outcome. If you decide, top-down, everyone might not necessarily be happy, but there isn’t a lot of room to argue the decision.

By voting, then deciding not to accept the results of the vote, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the majority of people won’t be happy with the decision. Not only that - they’ll be less happy than if the decision had just been made behind an office door to begin with. Which is too bad, because the appreciation dinner is an event that’s supposed to bring everyone together, and now everyone will just be talking about the decision-making process.