I am thinking about what it means to be unilateral.
Unilateral mainly means “one sided” and the term can be applied in activities related to governance, leadership, and really anything that involves a decision. The opposite of unilateral would be multilateral — a “multi-sided” action. Unilateral actions are efficient and effective at forcing a system to adapt to the decision maker. Multilateral decisions are better when collaboration is required. One is not better than the other if consequences are not considered.
Here’s the rub — there are leaders who do not consider the second and third order consequences of their unilateral decisions. And when those decisions impact large and complex systems, then whiplash and other forms of destructive system behavior can occur. It’s my experience that this archetype of leaders typically do not collect inputs from others before making a decision — and there’s the real issue.
It would seem that in complex systems, multilateral decision making may be better. Or, a blended approach of collecting decision inputs collaboratively and then making a unilateral decision are optimal. It’s almost if any form of leader must intentionally design a decision making process where it’s easy for people to give inputs, and it’s even easier for people to sound the alarm if a decision could de-rail the system, and then it’s even easier for a leader to make their decision and learn as quickly as possible.
That’s why I love music. The system that is music is one where many people make inputs, there are people who are unilaterally responsible for executing certain functions (drummers set time for example), and there are mechanisms for making changes mid-performance and guard-rails to prevent songs from going off the rails. What’s more, these types of systems are typically fun to play in and often show us something about ourselves that other activities can’t.
Like most things in life — unilateral is not in and of itself a wrong thing. Application matters.