How do I make a decision that affects the whole household?
Consultation without a decision rule produces resentment either way. How to say up front who decides what, and how to include people whose stake is real but small.
- Difficulty
- beginner
- Time
- 40 min
- Read
- 3 min
Short answer
Say at the start what kind of decision it is: one you are informing people about, one you want input on, or one everyone decides jointly. Most household arguments come from people believing they were in one category while the decision was actually in another. Name the category, name who decides, and name what input will actually change.
Decisions affecting several people fail in two symmetrical ways. Someone decides alone and everyone else feels overruled; or everything is opened to the whole household and nothing gets decided, with the person who cares least effectively holding a veto. The way out is not more or less consultation, it is being explicit about which kind of decision this is before the discussion starts.
Step by step
- Classify the decision before you raise it.Informing — it is decided, people need to know. Consulting — you will decide, but input will genuinely change it. Joint — nobody proceeds without agreement. All three are legitimate; pretending one is another is not.
- Say the classification out loud when you raise it."I am going to decide this, but I want to hear what you think first" prevents almost all of the resentment, because nobody spends effort believing they hold a veto they do not have.
- Weight input by stake, not by volume.The person who uses the thing daily has more standing than the person who will see it occasionally. Say so explicitly rather than treating all opinions as equal and then quietly ignoring some.
- Give children a real but bounded say.A choice between two acceptable options is genuine participation. A veto over whether the family moves is not appropriate, and offering it and then overriding it is worse than not offering it.
- Set a decision date at the outset."We decide on Sunday." Without a date, joint decisions default to whoever is most persistent, or to no decision at all, which is itself a decision made by inertia.
- Record what was decided, by whom, and on what basis.It stops the decision being relitigated and it protects the decider from carrying sole blame later if it does not work out. Two lines somewhere everyone can see.
- Agree how it gets reviewed.A date to look at whether it is working converts an argument about prediction into an experiment, and it lets someone accept a decision they disagreed with without conceding permanently.
Tips
- In shared houses, separate decisions about shared money from decisions about shared space. They are different questions and combining them makes both harder.
- Where one person will do all the work of implementing the decision, that person's preferences should carry extra weight, and it should be said rather than assumed.
- If the same disagreement recurs, the underlying issue is usually the decision rule, not the topic. Fix the rule once and several arguments disappear.
Common mistakes
- Consulting after deciding — It is detectable, and it costs more trust than deciding openly would have. If the decision is made, inform people and say so.
- Requiring unanimity on ordinary decisions — It hands a veto to whoever cares least or objects most readily, and it makes the household slow to act on things that need acting on.
Questions people ask
How much say should children get?
Real input on things that affect them, bounded by what is actually available. A choice between two options you can live with is honest participation; an open question you intend to overrule is not.
What about housemates on a shared cost?
Anyone paying gets a say proportionate to what they pay and how much they use it. Agree the rule before the decision arrives, ideally when people move in.