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Decisions lacking of any dissent typically are done easily.

If everyone agrees with a decision it’s probably not the type of question you should ask in the first place. Wastes time for nothing.

So you only hire people who totally agree with you?

Was this a “who wants to get lunch?” survey?

+1 to other commenters. ;)

But, more seriously, how do you handle objections? Are you just apeing the Apache “+1” stuff like everyone does, or do you also implement the “0” and “-1 must have clear objection” parts, too?

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2222-people-who-agree-with-you-should-drive-you-nuts

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Love the blog. :-)

Usually, you at least reveal the votes only after everyone has cast his vote to minimize bias effects.

I am sure, 37s will say none of their employees will ever be reluctant to be the only one who goes against the grain and spoil the consensus. Well, maybe they are the one exception.

Lame… consensus building or fake leadership.

The question was: “What’s the international dialing code for the US?”

“If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.”

I find the other comments interesting given the lack of information in the blog post.

How the commenter reads between the lines is actually quite a good indication of their perception of 37signals as a company!

Maybe this is a good tease for how you make decisions if someone doesn’t concur?

Lots of companies/groups/teams rely on consensus and voting. It’s how disagreements are resolved where it gets interesting.

What do you guys do when there’s a -100 among the mix?

You guys aren’t following your own principle of simplicity!

Why the number? All you need is + or -

+1 for the +1 reference. Limit the amount of “what ifs” by just giving an up/down vote on the issue. This isn’t an inherent way of determining how or what action to take. Way to foster a simplified way of decisions making.

John:

The original description with this post (and in the RSS feed) said this:

“Decision making, 37signals style. If your company can’t make decisions this easily, here’s a shameless plug for REWORK .”

...which sounds a bit more provocative and may explain the comments.

I was impressed by Matt’s post earlier. This post seems the opposite. What am I missing?

From the limited amount of information we have, looks like a classical case of groupthink (Which isn’t good, btw). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

@Jeremiah, a sense of humor.

+1 for Josh’s comment re lunch