The Divine Satchel by DALL-E

I was riding my bike, 40 minutes into a one hour bike ride from Copenhagen to Ballerup, focusing intensely on the audiobook playing in my ears. All of a sudden a right-turning electric bike speedly overtakes me as I turn left in a junction. Subconciously I barely read the words written on a satchel mounted on the back of the battery-powered metal horse:

Atom Veto

That sounded so cool I did a double take. I paused the audiobook - Jim Holden and the crew had to wait.

The two words reminded me of what I had been working with the last few years at Copenhagen Optimization. Scaling our software product development organization while keeping it fun, interesting and motivating to work for everyone. Our approach is self-organizing teams, with autonomy and decision power at the frontline. Not just because it’s more effective (not the same as efficient), but because it’s the right thing to do. The parts that make up the whole, should also have a say in what the whole is or becomes as we grow.

When there’s no person with formal power in the group, there are a few different approaches to make a choice as a group, with each their own trade-offs that I won’t dive into this post as this is about the mystical message from the satchel.

Here are a two classical ways to approach group decision-making:

  • Consensus-based decision-making: This is about everyone being actively for a proposal, before it can be made.
  • Consent-based decision-making: This approach inverts the agreement requirement, so that a decision can be made as long as nobody is actively against the decision. In other words, if nobody vetos against the proposal.

Atom is a part of the whole; Veto is the power to say no.

Back on the bike, I wasn’t actually sure what the divine satchel had really intended for me, but I had to know for sure if I was making shit up and if I was about to steal this particular word composition. I stood up on my bike and raced after the two-wheeled electric vehicle. When I was eventually close enough to re-read the satchel, it just said:

Atran Velo

Awesome!