Consensus Kills
Or, how to make decisions in your start-up.
“Who owns this decision?” is a question I ask all the time.
All too often, the answer is muddled. “We all do” or “It’s a joint marketing and sales call.”
If it’s everyone, it’s no one.1
When there is not a clear way your company makes decisions, you are at risk for bad stuff.
I regularly see teams who are stuck on this simple but really hard question: who decides?
They have talent, momentum, and money, but every decision feels slow, painful, and fraught. Nobody wants to step on toes. Everyone wants to be heard. They mistake endless discussion for alignment.
This is one of the hardest transitions any leadership group has to make: moving from everyone decides everything to one person decides something.
The Problem
Some founders think consensus is a superpower. I don’t.
I see consensus building in start-ups as a band-aid for other problems.
Consensus feels good because it keeps the peace. Everyone gets a say, everyone feels safe. But it’s a trap. It slows you down, solves to the middle (or less), and stifles the superpowers that made your team great in the first place.
No great company was ever built on consensus.2
Here’s how I see it:
Consensus kills speed. When every call requires total agreement, the company moves at the pace of its slowest conversation.
No clarity, no accountability. When ownership is vague, outcomes are vague. Decisions get revisited, undone, or forgotten. Everyone’s involved, but no one is responsible.
Fear of authority. Founders often start equal, so naming authority feels taboo. They avoid saying who owns what, which can breed resentment and stall progress.
That mix of consensus, confusion, and fear burns time, drains trust, and kills urgency.
The Foundation
To fix decision-making, you don’t start with process or frameworks. You have to start with what’s underneath it all: trust, authority, and clarity.
Trust means believing that the person who owns a decision will act in good faith, seek input, and make the best call for the company, not for themselves. If you don’t trust your co-founders or your team, there’s a bigger issue here.3
Authority means giving someone real power to make and own a decision. Not pretend power. Not “you decide but I’ll second-guess.” Real authority.
Clarity means everyone knows who decides, what input is expected, and when the decision will be made. No mystery. No shadow vetoes.
Those three are the foundation for how decisions get made. Everything else sits on top.
So, once you’re good there, now what?
The Model
Once you have trust, authority, and clarity, you can operate on a simple model4 I use with teams:
Responsible. Every decision has one owner. This is paramount, IMO. Always and only one person. Clear and defined. That person is responsible for gathering input from all the relevant parties, makes the call, and owns the result.
Accountable. The owner is measured on the outcome, not on how many people agreed with them. Accountability brings reality into the system. We celebrate their success and support them when they miss.5
Input. Others contribute context and expertise, not votes. Input is required, consensus is not.
If you’re not the owner, you have two options: “agree and commit” or “disagree and commit.” Anything else sucks, is weak, and should be rooted out.
When every important decision has one responsible person, clear accountability, and thoughtful input, companies move faster and feel lighter.
Why Speed and Accountability Matter
Speed is not about recklessness. It’s about momentum.
Every delay has a cost. When decisions linger, people wait. Energy drains. The best ideas fade under the weight of more meetings and more opinions.
The fastest teams aren’t the ones who make perfect decisions. They’re the ones who make decisions, learn quickly, and adjust. Speed gives you more turns of the wheel. More experiments. More learning.
Speed is a strategy. It’s a competitive advantage. It signals confidence and earns trust. You can fix a bad decision. You can’t fix a slow culture.
And accountability is what keeps it all honest. When people know they’re accountable, they show up differently. They prepare. They think. They own results, good or bad. Accountability builds trust and maturity. It replaces fear with pride.
Every company I’ve ever led or coached got better the moment we stopped trying to get everyone to agree to everything.
So, in your next meeting, ask two questions:
Who owns this decision?
From whom do they need to get input?
If the answer to either one isn’t obvious, make it so. That’s your job as CEO.
If this post helped you, or made you think of someone, please consider forwarding it to them. And let me know what resonated or missed. I read every reply.
As my wife says, “Oh brother, that’s a problem!”
Prove me wrong and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.
And one that you need to address ASAP!!
There are other great models - RACI, RAPID, etc… I like this one. It’s my blog, so I own the decision. ;-)
Unless they miss all the time…. that’s a different post.
Brilliant. Truely spot on with "If it's everyone, it's no one." This reminds me of your earlier thoughts on efficient team structures. Consensus often feels safe, but it's a bottleneck disguised as collaboration. It's like trying to debug code by committee – slow and muddled. Who decides, indeed!