Why Projects need Consensus to Succeed?

A project is by definition a highly innovative task which needs the collaboration of different experts to find a perfect solution.

If you take that definition serious,  it`s not necessary to create a project to solve a problem which could also be solved by a single function or person. And it`s not possible to create a perfect solution merely by the decisions of a single person, e.g. the project manger or the project sponsor. So you have to create consensus within a project team if you really want to create an optimal solution.

And there is a second reason to go for consensus in project work: nearly every solution you create in a project needs the acceptance of its stakeholders to be implemented. If you
don´t get acceptance, resistance will increase and you won´t get your solution implemented on a broad range. The better the acceptance of a specific solution is the better is the rate of successful implementation. There a rule of thumb, that a 80% solution with 100% acceptance will gain a much more higher implementation rate than a perfect 100% solution with a acceptance rate beneath 50%.

In my experience there are three steps in finding consensus within a project team and their stakeholders to get a perfect and accepted project result that can be implemented without resistance:

1. Get a mutual understanding between all parties involved about the initial situation of the problem or innovative field
2. Synchronize the plan how to find a solution
3. Find an agreement on a specific solution

You usually need a set of communication skills to facilitate the consensus building process on these three important steps. One simple trick is to ask a lot of questions instead of finding quick answers and solutions especially in the beginning of the project. If you ask questions, you support the parties involved to express their specific view and help the team to understand each other. And mutual understanding is the very first step to create consensus!

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