Why is it Difficult to Create Consensus in Projects?

An ideal project needs the consensus of all parties involved to create excellent results which are accepted and can be implemented in a sustainable way.

But why is it so difficult to agree to other opinions?

The reason is that every party has its own natural view on the topic of a project and therefore tends to prefer a solution that fits exactly to his own sight.

Let me give an example: A project team which aims to implement a new software solution to improve the customer relationship management of an online-shop of a medium sized company. Let us have a view on the different sights of the parties involved:

Let´s start with A, a sales representative and one of the future users of this software. He loves the old systems and the endless bypasses they created to optimize the performance of the system. He likes to get a system which is quite similar to the old one, just faster and without bugs.

Team member B is an expert of software development and would like to try out a complete new technology which is much easier to handle than the old one. Therefore he suggests a solution he got to know some weeks before on a trade fair. Fortunately he is quite sure that this solution is perfectly tailored to the needs of this project.

The accountant C has to care for the small budget and prefers an affordable standard solution.

D, the overall manager of the IT department goes for a product that minimizes the interfaces to other parts of the IT architecture and guarantees minimized maintenance costs.

Of course you can imagine what would happen if there are further parties involved in the project like the CEO or the customer helpdesk: they all bring their own views on a future solution!

The pattern of this project can be found find in almost every project: the interface of the different solutions that are recommended of the parties involved to a project use to be very small in the beginning of a project. So you regularly have two choices: find a person that takes the decision or try to find a team consensus. Regarding the sustainability of a solution the latter one should be the better choice, even if it seems to be much more exhausting.

If you plan to facilitate your team towards consensus you have to grow the interface of the different solutions step by step. It could be easier if you use different well-known communication skills like active listening, asking questions and visualization of common sense.

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C-2v99paQM&feature=youtu.be

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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