Thank you.

Hey Miki. Yes, I to encourage people to make mistakes on their own. A child who’s responsibility is to look after a bike, can be put into various parts of the tree. If the child is mature, then maybe the parents can say it’s up to the child to look after her bike and that they will not buy her a new bike. If the child loses the bike, there’s a good lesson. (Consequences without punishment.) When it’s a parent’s bike the child uses, then it could be trunk decision because it impacts the family.

If it’s a unilateral decision, then by definition, it is a leaf decision. Unilateral means to affect one side. Leaf decisions can be impacting.

I can kind of see why the explanations of the four parts are complex. Because it is a model or a concept, it’s not something to live by and not something that needs to be defined to precision.

There could be 5, 8, 10+ categories if everything like a person’s maturity and responsibilty was incorporated. The tree gives a visual, simple reference for empowering other’s to make decisions. If it was a complete model, then it’d be complex.

A lot of communication and managerial theories get people into trouble because they live-by them as they try to fit the world to their book-view of the world instead of using the model as a guiding reference.

First, I must admit to being severely prejudiced in favor of simplicity as opposed to complexity. Although I understand what you are getting at, I found the tree metaphor complicated and the explanations of root, trunk, branch and leaf decisions overly similar and confusing.

I disagree when you say,“It can be tough to decide whether a decision is a leaf or branch, branch or trunk, trunk or root decision, but it does not really matter. Not every decision fits perfectly in the model – it does not need to. You can be imprecise. It is a model to help you – not one you must live by. In this model, close enough is good enough provided you have mutual agreement.”

We’re in agreement on the idea that the definitions must be mutually acceptable, but I believe that they need to be clearly defined at the start. ‘Close’ usually means that there are assumptions on both sides and assumptions lead to disagreements 99% of the time.

I strongly believe that growth comes from making mistakes on one’s own, without input from any source. It seems that your tree offers that, but in a very limited and controlled way.

Likewise, I can think of many root decisions that need to be made almost, if not totally, unilaterally.

The level of authority that goes with delegation is a function of the strengths and experience of the individual. These are what changes as opposed to the situation.

Using your teenager example, the level of independent decision making should be based on the maturity and responsibility of the teen in question, rather than age, sex, or the specific situation. /situations are constantly changing and really can’t be determined ahead of time.

In any arena of life, when we know there are choices to make around who does what, we owe it to others to support and encourage them to take to the floor.

Doing everything ourselves is, indeed, the worst option for everyone.

Martin Haworth