The Growing Urgency for Shared Decision Making

Why Seeking Blind Support for Important Decisions Is No Longer Working

By Corky O'Callaghan

Editor's note: This article was published in the Winter 2009 Issue of the Arizona School Boards Association Journal.

Imagine for a minute that someone approaches you and says, “I’ve just made a decision that will change your life in a significant way and, even though I didn’t consult with you before I made this decision, I expect you to go along with it because you elected me to decide what is best for you.”

If this scenario resonates with you, it should because it is how we’ve been taught that governance works. Elected officials are supposed to make decisions, and everyone else is supposed to support them. However, things are changing.

Changing Expectations

Even the most ardent and loyal supporters of America’s civic institutions are beginning to ask serious questions about decisions that are being made for them. This shift in attitude and expectations is impacting all levels of governance – including boards of education.

Today, asking citizens to blindly support important decisions that personally affect them is a recipe for disaster. It is not only rude, arrogant and insulting, but it breeds distrust and often fails to generate the support that is needed. However, when the people impacted by important decisions are involved in making those decisions, the picture changes dramatically. For me, a major “aha!” moment about the power of shared decision making occurred while working with a school system in Ohio.

The “Aha!” Moment

Following several failed attempts to pass tax increases, educational leaders in the West Holmes School District had become gun-shy about asking for additional taxes of any kind for their schools. In the meantime, however, student enrollment was increasing and the school system had run out of classroom space. As a result, elementary class sizes had ballooned to 30 students and course offerings in the middle school and high school were being eliminated.

Rather than focusing on a solution to this growing problem which would quickly bring up the tax question, the school administration and board of education initiated an informal conversation with teachers to determine how increasing class sizes and decreasing course offerings were impacting their students. For the next 12 months, this conversation spread to include non-teaching staff, parents, key neighborhood and community leaders, and other school district residents.

One of the major challenges facing school leaders was keeping the conversation focused on clarifying the problem and resisting the temptation to jump ahead to a discussion of possible solutions. However, they persevered and, by the time the discussion shifted to solutions, the growing sense of urgency that something needed to be done about the district’s overcrowding problem had reached a fever pitch.

To make a long story short, the community – highly energized by knowing and owning what was at stake – asked the board of education to place a large, $10 million bond issue on the ballot to fix the problem - and then passed it by a wide margin.

An Emerging Strategy

Today, the legacy of the West Holmes success story lives on. Faced with increasing pressure to improve and fund student achievement, more and more educational leaders are successfully utilizing key principles of the shared decision making process to build support for what they need.

The linchpin. In discussing challenges and opportunities, we often focus on symptoms rather than root causes. For example, we talk about the need for more money for our schools, but fail to take it a step further and discuss how the lack of money will impact students. The linchpin of shared decision making is identifying what is at stake and then drilling down until the impact is clear and compelling.

Going slow to go fast. Shared decision making takes time to work. Rushing into it doesn’t provide the time needed for people to digest information, wrestle with the various tradeoffs involved and then build consensus regarding courses of action. The West Holmes story, for example, encompassed a year. While it doesn’t always take this much time to build support for an important decision, having a few meetings with a handful of people doesn’t usually get the job done.

Resisting the temptation. When facing an important decision, we often spend too little time focusing on the impact of what is at stake and too much time focusing on what to do about it. At West Holmes, educational leaders resisted the temptation to advance their community conversation to a discussion of solutions to their overcrowding problem before the impact of the overcrowding was clearly understood and school district residents reached the conclusion that there was a compelling need to fix the problem.

Community ownership. People are willing to reach consensus and assume ownership when they feel they’ve been an active part of the decision making process. This occurred in the West Holmes School District when residents spent a year wrestling with their school system’s overcrowding problem and then asked their board of education to place a bond issue on the ballot to build additional classroom space.

The grapevine effect. The engine that creates community ownership is the grapevine effect. Again, as was demonstrated at West Holmes, consensus over what to do about the district’s overcrowding problem was only reached after hundreds of school district residents spent a year discussing the impact it was having on the students within their school system. These discussions included one-on-one meetings with 100 neighborhood and community leaders, 40 coffee discussions in residents’ homes, a meeting with 250 school parents and a district-wide state of the schools meeting which attracted 400 people in the middle of a snow storm.

Courageous leadership. When push comes to shove, many educational leaders don’t trust the public any more than many school district residents trust them. At West Holmes, educational leaders had the courage to step out of their comfort zones, take a leap of faith and trust in the wisdom of their community. And the community responded in a very positive way by overwhelmingly passing a major bond issue.

Ready to Do Something

A growing number of Americans are deeply concerned today about the direction they feel our country is headed. What’s more, they are tired of sitting on the sidelines being ignored while they helplessly watch people they don’t trust make important decisions for them. Instead, they are looking for ways to get involved and make a difference.

This heightened desire “to do something” is now providing educational leaders with a golden opportunity to unleash the positive power of shared decision making to address important challenges facing their school districts.