> Archived Articles   In the collection Decision-making The Big Picture: a revealing perspective Who decides? Depends on who's accountable for the bottom line. “Getting the balance right is often a question of knowing how to listen, negotiate, and make people aware of the big picture.”

The Big Picture A Revealing Perspective (March 2004) Remember the game we played as kids where we drew a line on the ground, and two teams, one at each end of a rope, tried to pull the other team over the line? Winners had different strategies. Sometimes they had the biggest team. Sometimes they pulled longer and harder. Kids' tug-of-war is a game with winners and losers. The international company Net tug-of-war game is not so clear-cut. It is played over issues such as What do we include in the primary navigation bar? Who decides what is on the home page? Who decides whether or not there even is a common home page? How is content managed in different languages? And so on. If this tug-of-war game has winners and losers, the web site or intranet will not work well. This is a game where everyone needs to win or at least feel like a winner. How do you make people feel like winners? By asking their opinions, in advance. By listening, by responding - either wholly, in part or by telling them why you cannot do what they want, or by finding a way to do what they want. I'll never forget a web site workshop I ran for a client in London, where the 10 or so webmasters disagreed strongly with the corporate policy, defined from another country. They had no intention of implementing it for their sites. They each had strong opinions about the right way to design a web site. This huge multinational had hundreds of web sites around the world, most born as "illegitimate offspring" conceived from frustration with headquarter's painfully slow implementation of guidelines and tools. My first move in the workshop was to hand the web masters a copy of the list of web sites. Stunned silence, disbelief, a quick visit of those at the top of the list, The realization that every single one had its own look and feel. No two looked like they came from the same company. The team came to a quick informal consensus We will cooperate with our corporate guidelines. When we do not agree with them, we will try to bring about a change from the inside, not ignore them!   (March 2004)

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