The Advice Process¶
Definition¶
The advice process is a decision rule for organizations without bosses: any person can make any decision, but before acting they must seek advice from everyone significantly affected and anyone with relevant expertise. They are not obligated to adopt the advice, only to genuinely take it into account. Ownership of the decision — and its consequences — stays with the one person who chose to act.
In the Book¶
Laloux introduces the practice through AES, the global energy company co-founded by Dennis Bakke, where it is one of the few things that can get an employee fired for ignoring. The book's central illustration is Shazad Qasim, a junior financial analyst who wanted to explore an electricity venture in Pakistan against the CEO's own skepticism. Because the decision was his to make once he'd sought advice, he went ahead — and two and a half years later a $700 million power plant was running, funded by a $200 million AES equity commitment that Qasim himself, not Bakke or the board, decided on. The book explicitly positions the advice process as a third path beyond the usual binary of hierarchical authority (fast, but disempowering) and consensus (inclusive, but slow and responsibility-diffusing): everyone affected gets a voice, but not veto power, and one identifiable person remains accountable. Buurtzorg uses an internal social network to solicit advice at scale; when crises hit (FAVI facing collapsed orders after the 1990 Gulf War, for instance), the same process — asked more urgently, of more people — was used rather than suspended.
Why It Matters¶
The advice process resolves a coordination problem that looks binary — either someone has authority to decide, or everyone does — by separating the right to decide from the obligation to consult. It lets an organization keep the speed of unilateral action and the wisdom and buy-in of collective input, without the accountability vacuum that consensus creates when a decision turns out badly. Wherever a system currently forces a choice between a bottleneck (all decisions funnel through one authority) and paralysis (all decisions require agreement), the pattern of "consult widely, decide singularly, own the outcome" is a candidate solution.