The Million Dollar Question: Deciding How We Decide

What would you do if your town received a million dollar grant?

The Opportunity

Imagine waking up to a message like this. One million dollars! Your mind immediately races to all the possibilities. The performing arts center desperately needs a new HVAC system. That ancient playground equipment by the elementary school has been an eyesore (and honestly, a safety hazard) for years. Maybe a scholarship fund for local students? Or why not just divide it equally among all residents?

But before any of these ideas can be debated, there's that one condition to consider: the town needs to agree on how it will make these decisions. At first glance, this might not seem like much of an obstacle. We'll just vote, right?

Then you run into your neighbor at the grocery store. "A vote? No way! If this money is for the entire town, everyone should agree on how we use it." Later that afternoon at the coffee shop, another neighbor corners you. "You know what? We should do a lottery! Put all the proposals in a hat and let fate decide." Another neighbor comes up and says, "What we need is a committee of experts. People who understand urban planning, education, and community development. Let them make an informed decision for all of us."

Ok, so maybe we won't jump to a vote just yet.

Invisible Systems

This dilemma is telling. We often jump to making decisions that we rarely step back to consider and examine the systems - the rules, rituals, and norms - that shape how they’re made in the first place. Like fish questioning water, the very act of examining how we decide to decide can feel disorienting.

The recent US presidential election offers a ready example of how we simultaneously use multiple decision-making frameworks. We accept the popular vote for local measures, count the popular vote for presidential candidates, but only accept the results of the Electoral College for presidential contests. And when you realize that states have different ways of deciding the primaries - some allowing only party-affiliated voters to select from their small consideration set and others going for open primaries with ranked choice voting - you quickly realize that the way we decide things can seem quite random. Why should people in Maine have a different way of electing their candidates from people in Washington state? Then again, why shouldn't they?

In The Dawn of Everything, anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that "the ultimate question of human history, as we'll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together."

This point, that we, humans, are incredibly creative and have experimented with different ways of organizing and being and will continue to do so, is often forgotten. It's easy to assume that the way things are are there for a reason. And when people do point out the invisible systems around them, it can easily fall into the trap of seeming like you're nitpicking a theoretical question and not focusing on the substance itself. We have the power to reexamine and try out new ways of making decisions together. All we have to do is look at history and around the world today to see a diverse range of these types of governance experiments.

Deciding How to Decide

When presenting this million-dollar scenario in various settings, I've noticed how quickly people jump to imagining how they would use the funds before grappling with the meta-question at hand. And I get it: it’s much more fun to think of the different ways to use those funds - who amongst us haven’t daydreamed about what they would do if they won the lottery - than it is to think about how we would decide as a group.

A fairer interpretation might be that by getting specific about what we’re deciding, it can help us choose how we might make that decision. Choosing what to have for dinner versus who we want as our leader have different implications for our lives. One might need a random selection and another might need more deliberation. (I'll leave it up to you to see which goes with which.)

The thing is, we have a bunch of different ways to collectively make decisions. For example, here’s a starting point of different ways of making decisions:

Majority Vote: The classic "50% plus one" approach—a proposal needs more than half the votes to win, ensuring broad support but potentially leaving a large minority unsatisfied.
Plurality Vote: Whoever gets the most votes wins, even without a majority—simple and quick, but could result in decisions that most people actually oppose (imagine a 35% "winner" when the other 65% is split among alternatives).
Consensus: Everyone needs to agree, or at least not actively object—it can take longer but builds stronger buy-in and often leads to more creative solutions that address everyone's concerns.
Citizen Assemblies: A randomly selected group of residents, given time and expert input, deliberates on behalf of the community.
Representation: Elected officials or appointed experts make decisions on behalf of others—efficient but removes direct citizen participation and can concentrate power.
Liquid Democracy: People can either vote directly or delegate their vote to someone they trust on specific issues—imagine being able to delegate your vote on environmental projects to a local ecologist while keeping your direct vote on education matters.
Sortition: Random selection of decision-makers from the population, like jury duty—gives everyone an equal chance to participate and can lead to surprisingly thoughtful outcomes when people are given proper support and information.
Token-Weighted Voting: Voting power is proportional to the number of tokens each person holds—common in cryptocurrency organizations where accounts with more tokens get more say.
Autocratic: One person makes all the decisions—the fastest option by far, and sometimes surprisingly effective (think of a skilled curator or artistic director), but requires immense trust and raises obvious concerns about power and accountability.

Unfortunately, we don’t have clear guidance on when to use certain types of methods.

Why This Matters

This thought experiment arrives at a moment when many people are questioning the fundamentals of how we make decisions together. From ranked-choice voting initiatives sprouting up across the United States to experiments with participatory budgeting in cities like Seattle and Boston to citizen assemblies being used in countries like Ireland and Austria and companies like Anthropic and Meta, there's a growing recognition that the how of decision-making might be as crucial as the what.

This is an opportunity to exercise our civic muscles and shape how we want to live together. And like any muscle, our ability to make decisions together grows stronger with practice. At a time when many communities feel fractured and democratic institutions face mounting challenges, we need these capabilities more than ever.

The potential impact of getting this right extends beyond just making better decisions. When communities actively engage in designing and practicing how they decide together, several important shifts can occur.

First, the process connects us to each other and to causes that matter. Working together on decisions forces us to listen to different perspectives and understand the complex web of needs in our community when deliberating together.

Second, it helps us appreciate pluralism: the idea that people can hold different, even competing, yet equally valid views about what's best for their community. There might be multiple "right" answers, and the challenge lies in finding ways to honor and sit amidst the diversity of perspectives.

Third, successfully making decisions together builds capability, confidence, and trust. Each time a community navigates a complex decision, it creates a positive feedback loop, strengthening our capacity to tackle even bigger challenges together. And when people start believing that their voice and actions matter, it can kickstart a virtuous cycle.

Looking Ahead

At this point, this is just a thought exercise to help us reflect on the meta question of figuring out how a group of people would decide how to make decisions together.

But it doesn't have to stop there.

I'd love to explore a few directions:

Group Workshops: Bringing communities together to see how they would approach this scenario and identify what kind of information, assets, or guidance could help
Game Development: Building simulations that let people play around with different decision-making frameworks
Experiment: Designing studies—from controlled lab settings to real-world trials—to understand how people decide how to decide and how that potentially changes with different sets of inputs

For those intrigued by these questions of collective decision making - whether you're interested in developing decision-making frameworks, creating simulations, or simply exploring how your own community makes choices - I invite you to join this exploration.

As we all look to the future of democracy here in the United States and beyond, I have a sense that figuring out how a bunch of neighbors can come together - and continue to come together - to solve problems relevant to them might just be the thing that can make a world of difference.