Decisions that travel
Mary Parker Follett’s way to stop team drift
📐 Welcome to this week’s complimentary issue of Leadership Architecture from Mindset Rebuild, providing you with design choices that travel without you.
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Some meetings feel finished in the room and fuzzy in the hallway.
People nod, action items appear, and then the choice blurs into five interpretations once the call ends.
No one is malicious. The decision didn’t have a body you could point to.
That’s where drift begins.
When I run into this, I think of Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933).
She wasn’t writing for slide decks. She worked with actual people in settlement houses and factories, then wrote books like The New State (1918) and Creative Experience (1924).
She paid attention to how groups behave when they’re trying to get something done. Her aim was simple: arrange the situation so the right action shows up.
You can hear the pragmatist in her language—power with instead of power over; conflict as information; integration as the work of fitting real interests together so the choice holds.
Peter Drucker later called her a prophet of management.
You don’t need the label.
You only need the move: design the room so the work can move without you.
Give the choice a body
Start where drift hides: the decision is an idea, not a sentence.
Write it so a stranger would understand:
Decision: Are we going to ______ or ______ for the next ______ to achieve ______?
Owner: one name Review: date
That’s it. One line to fix the shape.
As soon as the line appears, you’ll notice the temperature drop by a degree.
Lobbying diminishes because the frame becomes visible. People cease trying to dominate the room and begin engaging with the choice.
Keep it where work lives. Paste it in the brief, pin it in the project, put it on the whiteboard.
If it only lives in your memory or a slide from last Thursday, it will evaporate.
Map interests, not egos
Follett’s most helpful tool is also the lightest.
When you hear positions colliding, go underneath them and capture interests.
Do it on one page:
Needs (what success must include for each group)
Constraints (limits you actually have: capacity, timing, compliance, budget)
Shared aim (the smallest statement everyone is willing to own)
Ask each voice for one line in each column.
People will repeat themselves. Good. Repetition shows you where a design might fit.
When you see it, write the integrated choice in two plain sentences.
If you need a memo to explain it, please keep thinking.
The test is whether the choice still makes sense when someone reads it cold tomorrow.
Here’s a quick example you can steal today:
Decision: For the next 60 days, Product owns the launch brief to reduce rework.
Applies when: any feature leaves discovery.
Owner: Anna. Helpers: Dev lead, PMM.
First test: fill the brief for Release 7 by March 22.
Review: April 5.
Everyone can repeat this without you. That’s the point.
Let the page carry the weight
Threads are where decisions go to get blurry.
Give each important choice a small home; a single page with the minimum you need to act:
the decision sentence
when it applies (triggers)
the integrated choice (2–4 lines)
owner and helpers (names, not roles)
the first test you’ll see within seven days
the review date and what happens then (renew, revise, retire)
That’s not ceremony. It’s a handle.
When a question pops up Thursday at 4:10 p.m., people can grab the page and keep moving.
You free your future self from being the explainer of record.
Why this reduces pushback without a pep talk
Follett’s language around power helps here.
“Power over” leans on position and invites quiet resistance.
“Power with” designs the situation so people can move.
A clear decision, a named owner, a place to find it, and a date to look at it again; that’s “power with” in practice.
Your team recognizes the pattern and uses it.
The more you do this, the less you’ll need to play traffic cop.
There’s another benefit we don’t acknowledge enough: the review date.
Permanent decisions collect dust and exceptions.
A visible date gives everyone a safe way to try the choice and then talk about how it worked.
It lowers the emotional cost of committing, which is often what keeps decisions soft.
Make integration visible in five minutes
You don’t need a big meeting to do this well.
Try it asynchronously once this week:
Post the draft decision sentence in the project space.
Ask three people to add one line each under Needs, Constraints, and Shared aim.
Write the two-sentence integrated choice from what shows up.
Publish the page with owner, first test, and review date.
This takes less time than the “any quick thoughts?” thread that usually follows a meeting, and it leaves you with something a new teammate could understand a week from now.
A human note
I like clever frameworks.
They make me feel smart while the choice is still mush.
The days when I write the sentence, publish the page, and set a near-term review date, I stop gripping.
People act because the work is easier to grasp. When they bring me questions, we can point at the line together. It’s not personal. It’s the design.
Run one small move this week
Think about the recurring decision that always leaks: ownership of the brief, how handoffs start, what “ready” means before release, who approves a price change under a threshold.
Pick one.
Give it a body.
Post it where work lives.
Put a seven-day test on the calendar and a review date two weeks out.
Tell people exactly where to look next time it comes up.
You’ll feel the difference in how your DMs sound. T
he questions get shorter. The answers get reused. Your Wednesday meeting loses three minutes of circling.
That’s what “decisions that travel” feels like in the wild.
That’s a wrap (one quiet win this week)
Write one line for a decision that keeps getting squishy.
Name an owner. Publish the page.
Put a real date on the calendar to look at it again.
Then run the first test so the page doesn’t become decoration.
With respect for the work and the people doing it,
~Warren
P.S.
If naming that decision feels heavier than it should, you’re likely in an identity shift, not a productivity problem. Message me and tell me the one decision that’s been hardest to make — I’ll help you see what’s underneath it.