I definitely agree that middle managers are information brokers.. it is part of why they end up playing, or being considered as playing “politics”. What is “politics” in a corporate sense other than control and coloring of an information flow.

On consensus.. I’ve never been a huge consensus guy.. There are places where it works exceptionally well (extremely bright independent knowledge-workers, for instance), but with most of the rest of us it tends to break down in a number of classic ways because consensus only works if everyone *really cares* about getting the *same* thing done. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world may take pride in what they do, but don’t really care where they are going. Engineers, I find, are really bad at this outside of academia. I’ve rarely found an engineer that, when left alone to do their thing, would do work that would pay their salary in the future. IMHO: Someone, not the consensus, needs to create the problem statement.. after that consensus building process make for great brainstorming / solution framing and initial direction.. which then becomes an execution plan that typically ends up with small team execution with lightweight top-down controls.

Recently I’ve been thinking of the decision making jobs as more one of abstraction.. middle managers filter and color information that is then pushed up to less informed folks to make decisions on. This might sound stupid, but it may be that those folks make a better decision when they have *equally filtered* information from all directions and thus don’t imbalance the decision based on their area of expertise. (clearly more understanding is good as long as it’s of relatively equal depth on the relevant axes). Decisions need to then be made at the lowest level at which all the options/important data can be equally filtered.

When I think of all the times as an engineer that I looked at what my bosses and said “WTF are they doing?”, I have to laugh at my old self.

But at the same time, building consensus is a slow process. So this is almost certainly not realistic for a large-scale organization. I can dream, though.