How to ditch consensus and move your team forward

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Making decisions in a news organization can become exhausting, particularly if your team is one that favors consensus. While consensus ideally fosters greater team harmony and buy-in, that may not be the case in reality. Consensus not only requires slower decision-making, but if there’s not a culture of being able to safely disagree already in place, it may cause people to not speak up and frustrations can build.

While decision making models like OATS or RAPID help by clearly identifying who decision-makers are, they don’t say how decisions are made if the decider is a team.

This is why it’s also important to consider alternate decision-making approaches that focus less on consensus, and more on consent. And even if consensus remains your team’s favored approach, it can be helpful to identify an approach that can be used if your team reaches a mission-critical impasse.

Here are 5 different decision-making approaches that non-traditional newsrooms are using, but can be adapted for any sort of news organization:

1. Modified consensus/majority rules

Rather than trying to reach 100% of people on your team agreeing completely, some newsrooms set a percentage of staff that must be in agreement:

• 50%+1 person
  This works for Athens County Independent because they are a small team, and so statistically there’s not much difference between this and higher percentages. 
• 66%
  Defector uses this threshold for critical decisions such as selling or hiring/firing  executives. Athens County Independent also uses this threshold for serious decisions like firing someone, too.
• 75%
  In practice, Hell Gate makes their decisions via consensus, but their official paperwork sets a three-quarter threshold in case they weren’t ever able to meet consensus.

“We wanted to preserve that spirit [of consensus] without binding ourselves to its pitfalls,” said Nick Pinto, a co-founder of Hell Gate.

2. Safe to try

At RANGE, the team tries to seek full consensus but also informally uses the “Safe to Try” model. The threshold for this is, Is it safe to try? If so, it should be approved. But if it’s actively dangerous to the newsroom, you should shoot the idea down. 

“That’s a time to be like, no, no, no, we can’t spend all of our reserves on a robot,” said RANGE founder and co-owner Luke Baumgarten.

In this model, compromises then become about creating the boundaries to make a proposal safer to try, such as treating it as an experiment or putting time or financial boundaries around it.

3. Active solidarity

The Appeal used this approach, adapted from its union roots, for all day-to-day decision-making (major decisions, though, required ⅔ voting approval of each the staff and board). 

Team members would agree on a proposal if they felt like they could support it, even if it wasn’t their first choice. Key decisions were discussed in a weekly meeting and active solidarity was often given in Zoom (or on Slack) via a simple thumbs up.

4. Prefer, tolerate or block

The 51st does have a consensus-driven approach, but their approach allows team members to respond with one of three options to a proposal: “I prefer,” “I tolerate,” or “I block.” 

“I feel like a common phrase is, ‘I’m not a block but…’  and that’s worked for us,” said co-founder Maddie Poore.

By using this phrasing their team is able to surface concerns safely and encourages the team to discuss and make compromises.

5. Gradients of agreement

Canopy Atlanta makes most decisions via consensus but their official decision-making policy is the Gradients of Agreement and it’s listed at the top of their staff meeting notes. This approach provides their team options that more closely reflect how people often think about decisions.

The gradient has 8 levels:

1. Whole-hearted Endorsement (“I really like it!”)
2. Agreement with a Minor Point of Contention (“Not perfect, but it’s good enough.”)
3. Support with Reservations (“I can live with it.”)
4. Abstain (“This issue does not affect me.”)
5. More Discussion Needed (“I don’t understand the issues well enough yet.”)
6. Don’t Like But Will Support (“It’s not great, but I don’t want to hold up the group.”)
7. Serious Disagreement (“I am not on board with this, don’t count on me.)
8. Veto (“I block this proposal.”)

While they may not use it often, it was invaluable when people wanted to share their disagreement without causing a block.

“That Gradients of Agreement was a useful document for us, and one that I would definitely recommend for other organizations as well, because it’s very nuanced. If you do hit an impasse, you can know, ‘Okay, this is how we’re going to move it,” said Mariann Martin, a co-founder of Canopy Atlanta.

Bonus: Fist to five

While this isn’t a threshold approach used by a nontraditional newsroom that I’m aware of, Fist to Five is an interesting approach.

Here, each person displays their support by holding up a certain number of fingers (or typing a number into a Zoom or Slack chat):

• 3-5: Consent, with differing levels of support
• 1-2: Disagreement, with differing levels of concern
• 0: Block, the proposal is at odds with company values 

This echoes the spectrum of thoughts someone is likely to have while being more simplified than the full Gradients of Agreement.

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Cite this article

Chan, Tara Francis  (2025, Dec. 10). 5 ways to make better decisions in your newsroom. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/5-ways-to-make-better-decisions-in-your-newsroom/