97% of the time consensus driven decision making means no deadlock and the other 3% of the time you can put decisions to a vote.
I've seen more value destroyed by a team lead inappropriately setting the wrong agenda than I have by team members not knowing when to shut up.
If anything I've found that there's often too much consensus (people who just go with the flow rather than voicing an opinion).
That's now how deadlocks work. You can't just vote your way out of them, if you could, you wouldn't be in a deadlock to begin with. You'd just be at the point where a decision needs to be made.
> If anything I've found that there's often too much consensus (people who just go with the flow rather than voicing an opinion).
That's a separate problem. A healthy and functional team needs to be able to trust one another's opinions and provide an environment where everyone feels comfortable speaking their minds. If you don't have those the value of intrateam communication is comically low.
I've seen a number of different scenarios:
1) Consensus after a short discussion (vast majority of cases).
2) Consensus after a drawn out discussion (occasional, usually the discussion is valuable even if it takes a while).
3) Consensus after a drawn out discussion with one or two holdouts who agree to go with the majority opinion under protest (not common).
4) A drawn out discussion where it becomes clear that further discussion is fruitless and a (close) vote makes the decision (very, very rare but it has happened).
I'd say that that most of the time the decisions made in one of these 4 scenarios are better than the decisions made unilaterally by a team lead.
Whatever you're referring to as 'deadlock' I'm not sure I've ever seen it - as a team lead or otherwise. What is it?
