How to Make a Decision Like a Tribe

If most of the work of business consists of making decisions, Helena Light Hadley, Marriott Lodging's director of total quality management, has no doubt why business often doesn't work. "Most people are frustrated by the way decisions get made," she says. "We all try to be troopers. People may complain, but then they say, 'Well, I trust the leadership to come up with the best thinking.' But behind closed doors people wonder if the leaders really do have all the information, especially when the decisions affect people who've had no input."

Recently Hadley experienced an alternative approach to corporate decision making. When she arrived at a ballroom of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts to participate in an annual meeting of business leaders committed to organizational learning, she expected to enter the familiar world of round tables, linen tablecloths, and name tags. Instead she entered a ceremonial lodge. Rather than sitting through a standard agenda with flip charts, overheads, and breakout groups, she and 35 other participants from some of the most traditional U.S. companies -- General Motors, AT&T, Unisys, Northern Telecom, Bank of Boston, Aetna, McKinsey & Co. -- and even the World Bank found themselves participating in a tribal council ceremony.

At the door to the darkened room stood WindEagle, a powerful medicine woman in her late 40s with a thick waterfall of silver and black hair, wearing a flowing skirt and shawl. WindEagle quietly feathered purifying sage smoke onto the participants as one by one they slipped inside the room. Flickering candlelight revealed ceremonial weavings draped from the ceiling, creating a teepee-like shape in the room. Gone were the usual tables and chairs, replaced by flowers, candles and stones forming a fire circle, and in each corner stood a tripod with more weavings and painted shields.

The group silently arranged itself in a circle, sitting on low-backed chairs without legs, and listened intently, if anxiously, to the introduction coming from RainbowHawk, a compact, stocky, 72-year-old medicine man with weathered features, bright blue eyes, and long, silver hair tied back in a braid.

This was ceremony time. For the next eight hours, the group would join in a ceremony, a medicine wheel council, a communal decision-making tool that would teach them how to replace contentious debate with constructive conversation. The tribal version of Robert's Rules of Order was in effect: the members of the circle would pass a talking stick to indicate who had the floor -- no interrupting allowed. That person would begin by identifying himself or herself by name and end by saying, "I have spoken." The group would then respond, "Ho!" -- the tribal equivalent of "You have been heard."

In the ceremony they would learn about the Four Shields and the Four Attentions, and then they would sit as chiefs at the eight points of the compass to hold a council. Each of the chiefs would have one unique perspective to offer the group; the wisdom of the council would emerge as the perspectives came together, one at a time, in a circular ceremony. "It is a way to bring balance into a group," WindEagle explained. "A way to put things in perspective without adversarialism."

That search for balance and perspective is embedded in the design of the ceremony and woven into the patterns that decorate the ceremonial lodge. Just as ancient tribes needed a tool to help them reach decisions that reflected the group's collective knowledge, so today's business "tribes" can benefit from a tool that breaks down organizational barriers, explores assumptions in a nonconfrontational style, and changes the mind-set, focus, and pace of the conversations that lead to decisions.

As the participants learned, these ancient teachings or Earth Wisdom, offered by RainbowHawk and WindEagle, who run the Ehama Institute in Los Gatos, California, can feel out of place in the fast-paced, technologically sophisticated, modern business world. And it's unlikely that hundreds of companies will be turning their conference rooms into ceremonial lodges anytime soon. But what the council ceremony offers is a set of insights and techniques that change how and why decisions get made.

Eight hours later, when the council was over, Helena Light Hadley left with a new insight into decision making. "The tribal approach makes a lot of sense," she says. "When a decision is put in the context of `the greater good,' you stop acting so territorial. You see the needs of the entire system, not just the little piece you're hanging on to."