New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1863. A 25-year-old Army engineer named Henry Martyn Robert, recovering from a fever he caught in Panama, was asked without warning to chair a meeting at his Baptist church. It went badly, and he lost control of the room. He was so embarrassed that he vowed never to attend another meeting until he understood parliamentary procedure, and the manuals he found were next to useless. Years later in San Francisco, serving on his church’s board and on the YMCA’s, he watched the same thing happen again: good people, endless squabbling over procedure. The church’s rules for its business meetings even told members to “love and be kind to one another.” It was a beautiful intention, and it didn’t prevent the fights. So Robert wrote down clear steps for who speaks, how a motion moves, and how a decision gets made. In 1876 he paid a printer for 4,000 copies of a small book that fit in a coat pocket. We know it as Robert’s Rules of Order.
His diagnosis still holds. He wrote that “the best of men, having wills of their own, are liable to attempt to carry out their own views without paying sufficient respect to the rights of their opponents.” Notice he didn’t say the worst of men. The trouble in most of our meetings isn’t bad people or bad intentions. It’s that nobody named the process before the debate started. Good intentions don’t run a meeting. A visible process does. Robert’s pocket book was kindness turned into steps anyone could follow.
That’s why this week we shared a tool we call Decide How We Decide. Most of us have lived the moment: the meeting ends, everyone nods, and three people leave with three different ideas of what was decided. The fix takes the first two minutes. Before the discussion starts, we say three sentences out loud. First, “Today we’re deciding ___,” one decision, written where everyone can see it. Second, “Here’s how we’ll decide,” whether that means I’ll decide after hearing you, we’ll decide together, or you decide and I’ll back it. Third, “You’ll hear the outcome by ___, from ___.” Then, in the last two minutes, we read the decision back word for word, owner and date included. People can live with a decision they didn’t love if the process was clear and fair. What erodes trust is finding out afterward that their input was a formality, or that the call was already made.
Our Insights page this week carried three talks about the part that comes before the vote. Julian Treasure on five ways to listen better, because we are losing our listening and a few simple practices can win it back. Celeste Headlee on ten ways to have a better conversation, which comes down to being present, staying curious, and listening to understand rather than to reply. Stanley McChrystal on listening and learning before we lead, and why rank stops working when the people closest to the problem know more than we do. Fair process starts there. People trust a decision they were heard in, and they can only be heard while the question is still open.
This isn’t about more rules. It’s about fewer surprises. Try the three sentences once this week, in the next meeting where a real decision is on the table, and listen for whether the read-back at the end matches what everyone thought they heard. When the how gets said out loud before the debate starts, nobody has to guess afterward.
Which decision on our plate right now would go better if we named how we’ll make it before anyone starts arguing for an answer?
Sources
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Office of History, “An Army Engineer Brought Order to Church Meetings and Revolutionized Parliamentary Procedure”: https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheets-View/Article/4461408/038-an-army-engineer-brought-order-to-church-meetings-and-revolutionized-parlia/
- New England Historical Society, “Robert’s Rules of Order Born From Bickering in a New Bedford Church”: https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/roberts-rules-or-order-born-from-bickering-new-bedford-church/