"90% Agreement"

On what do you and your team at work agree? Do you limit forward movement of your goals because you know that 1-2 members of your staff will disagree with the course of action? I thought about that as I read the Pew Research article entitled "90% Agreement." They highlighted how difficult it is to get to 90% agreement on anything and give instances where polling has shown that Americans do have a high level of agreement on only a few things. Since much of their research is strong fodder for heated political conversations, I'll let you go review the article and see their examples.

The article did cause me to reflect on how organizations paralyze themselves because they can't reach a desired level of consensus among their people about a change or how they rush off in new directions without getting "buy in" from a significant number of people-and the change fails.

If you are a manager of people, why not make a decision about the desired level of agreement BEFORE you actually introduce a change. That will help you plan strategy and how to position conversations. As the article stated, 90% agreement is almost impossible to achieve with any group. Working toward that goal is admirable-remaining inactive because you can't get that level of agreement is dangerous.