Decision Agreement

Principles for Decision-making

Non-domination: No participant, or group of participants should be able to dominate discussions or control decisions. That is why we avoid voting in making decisions. This doesn’t mean that all decisions need to be made by consensus or that everyone will be happy with the decisions that are made, but the process should be fair and unbiased.

Entrepreneurship equals decision-making power: Decisions should ultimately be made and led by those actively and regularly engaged in the work itself.

Subsidiarity: The ethos of our decision making is to delegate all responsibility for operational decision making to the body with the closest direct connection to the decision within our structure. This means that individual projects have a high level of autonomy over how they make decisions.

Open Communication: Participants practice open, honest communication with each other to create a transparent and trusting work environment. This allows us to make space for disagreement and not dilute more radical or strong propositions.

How we make decisions: decision protocols

Everyone is encouraged to move topics forward they think are important and urgent. When deciding whether or to what extent to involve others in a decision, we consider reversibility (how easily can a decision be easily reversed) and consequence (how large are the consequences of the decision).

⚠️ The greater the impact of a decision, the more people we involve. ⚠️

Individual Decisions

Autocractic: Reversible and low consequence day-to-day decisions that a person makes on their own. We practice “asking for forgiveness, instead of permission” to allow things to move ahead swiftly and with momentum.

Advice Process

In this case, one person is still the sole decision-maker, but gathers advice from others before doing so. We expect decision-makers to consult those who will be meaningfully affected, and those with expertise and experience in the matter. It is key to be as transparent as possible throughout the process and communicate openly.

Advice received must be taken into consideration. But advice is simply advice. It’s not permission seeking. Ownership of the issue stays clearly with one person: the decision-maker. Decision-makers need to be willing to question their initial assumptions and ideas for a solution and zoom back out to the problem space. If you ARE the decision maker: understand who is affected and who has expertise; don’t ask everyone.

There is no need to make watered down decisions to please everyone. It is about accessing collective wisdom in pursuit of a sound decision. With all the advice and perspectives the decision maker has received, they choose what they believe to be the best course of action. People respect decisions if they feel they were heard and understood. If we disagree with a decision, we practice forgiveness and bring it up with the decision-maker.

Group Decisions

Certain decisions of that are not reversible and have higher consequences are made as group decisions. This can take place either in specific project or domains teams (following the subsidiarity principle) or with the whole membership.

Consent: Our default group decision-making type is consent, a methodology with a specific meaning and practice. This does not mean everyone has to agree to a proposal, but that a decision moves forward if there are no blocks, which means that it is safe enough to try.

Consensus: There is an explicit exception for inviting new partners and associates, which is decided by consensus, meaning that all members must agree.

Timelines & Engagement

When practicing group decisions, we differentiate between standard and significant decisions and use the tool Loomio for making and documenting them.

	Standard Decision	Significant Decision
Passing Criteria	Passes as long as there are no blocks	Passes as long as there are no blocks and more than 50% of those stating a position agree
Engagement Threshold	none	All partners must participate
Minimum Timeframe	3 working days	5 working days (10 working days encouraged when possible)
Description	This is the default option for formal decisions. Ensures that no one strongly opposes a course of action, while allowing progress to move forward. If there are a large number of “no”s, it’s strongly advised to work on another iteration to find a better solution, but the proposer may move ahead at their discretion. Standard decisions use lazy consent, which means that by not voting you are implicitly giving consent.	This option should be used for more consequential decisions, such as changes to Agreements and investing of surplus from the Core budget. Apart from the above mentioned, it is up to the discretion of the proposer to decide when they feel something should be a significant decision. If a decision is significant, the proposer must flag it as such in the Loomio proposal.

Projects and Initiatives

Following the subsidiarity principle, projects that members work on (such as Cobudget, client projects) have high decision-making autonomy.

They have full independence in their day-to-day decision-making and a high independence on strategic decisions. Project teams and leaders use the advice process for deciding when to consult with other Greaterthan partners not involved in the project (when there would be an impact on the rest of GT). They are expected to share updates about their work regularly with the rest of the organization.

Decisions about Money

Buckets: we use so-called "buckets" with funds from the commons dedicated to specific areas, that have their own simple mechanisms to allow money to flow easily, such as the development bucket and biz dev bucket.

Small budgets: If a member sees a problem or opportunity that needs financial resources that is not covered by an existing bucket, they can make any financial decision up to 1500 € using the advice process. All advice decisions of this type must be communicated as follows:

1. Announce you are starting an Advice Process in the slack channel #moneydecisions

2. Document who you get advice from in this decisions tracker
3. Share outcome in the slack channel as well as the decisions tracker

Larger budgets: for any financial decisions above 1500 €, we use consent decisions on loomio, by adding to this dedicated financial decisions thread. This is also how we collectively decide on the topping up of buckets, as well as strategic allocations of our commons surplus.

We use Cobudget for collaborative funding, for example for the detailed allocation of our surplus to strategic initiatives (this happens 1-2 per year).

Water domain involvement: Irrespective of small or large budgets, the water domain must always be consulted in financial decisions. For an Advice Process, you must get advice from at least one water domain member. For a consent decision, it is highly recommended to get input from the water domain before making a proposal.

Projects: Apart from the standard contribution to the commons, projects have full autonomy on how to allocate their project budgets. See details in our financial agreement.