Decision Making Process
The Decision Making Process
The Guidelines
1) The people who show up are the right people. Not everyone needs to be involved in every decision. The people with a passion for that decision will show up, educate themselves, and make the best decision they can, because they care strongly about that issue.
2) The Law of Two Feet. Briefly stated, this law says that every individual has two feet, and must be prepared to use them. Individuals can make a difference and must make a difference. If that is not true in a given situation, they, and they alone, must take responsibility to use their two feet, and move to a new place where they can make a difference.
3) Decisions are in 'the now'. The decisions we make are the best decisions we can make knowing what we know. When we know something else, we may change the decision, or we may not.
4) Adversaries are potential advocates with different knowledge. Often, if two sides cannot reconcile, what they frequently can't reconcile is their own knowledge. One side knows one thing, another side knows another. The best way past this is to learn what the other person knows.
A Process
1) What is the ideal state? What would it be like if it was perfect?
2) What is the current state? Where are we now?
3) What is a realistic goal? Where can we realistically go?
4) What is the path there? Knowing where we are, where we want to go, and where we may want to go after that, what's a fairly good way to get from here to there?
In many cases, it's very tempting to skip directly to the path and fill in numbers 1-3 later. When this happens, items 1-3 are no longer guides and become justifications and the process goes south because it's very likely someone else has 'different knowledge'. It's best to avoid any hint of a path until everyone agrees on the ideal state, current state, and realistic goal. Once those are agreed on, brainstorming a path is often a good next step.
It sounds simple, but in practice, it's not always that simple. However, if a decision making process, looking at the above might be a good way to get it back on track.
Here's an excessively simple example:
Ideal State: Guild tags are not a barrier to communication.
Current State: Anyone not in guild chat can't read guild chat.
Realistic Goal: Create an addon that shares guild chat with anyone in a shared channel and visa-versa, assuming that someone with access to guild chat is in that channel.
Path: Find someone to write an addon that does the following:
1) Checks to see if the user is the moderator of chat channel X and a member of guild Y.
2) Allows chat channel X and guild Y to be set. (Channel name can be hardcoded in first versions.)
3) If #1, posts in guild chat anything that it sees in chat channel X.
4) If #1, posts in chat channel X anything that is said in guild chat.
5) If #1, posts in chat channel X anything that is said by the person running the addon in guild chat.
6) Allows easy (drop down) moderation of chat channel X. (Not needed in early versions.)
