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Within my thinking about space harmony I have related the process of decision-making to Laban’s ideas rather simplistically. If we are going to make a decision we have to give attention to what we are going to make this decision about; the next stage is to form an intention of what we want to do as a result of what we have given our attention to; and then there has to be a third stage of the implementation, the commitment to action. These terms are adapted from Laban – he talked about attention, intention, decision, precision. Attention was space-effort; intention was weight-effort; decision, time-effort and precision was concern with flow.  I never quite knew what he meant by precision. I think that flow has to be considered differently to the other three effort-elements. But just to look at the attention, intention, decision, I changed the word ‘decision’ to ‘commitment to action’ because the whole thing is a decision-making process. We begin a decision the moment we give attention to something. If I give attention to a thief stealing a woman’s handbag this attention will result in the intention of calling the police or something.   

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Harmony, perhaps, or proportion, can be applied to the decision-making process because if most of your initiative is in the intention stage but none in the attention stage then you’re going to be very vulnerable to working in a structure where all the signals are given to you by cooperative and loyal people to ensure that you don’t do something disastrous. I worked with a Chief Executive for over twelve years of whom it could be said that he was really out of proportion with regard to almost a complete lack of the intention stage. He would give a lot attention to investigating and exploring, he was very ready to take decisions and get things going, but he was never clear on what his intention was with the result that he got into all sorts of difficulties and had to be protected by good people working with him. He was a brilliant technologist and had fantastic ideas and strategies, he was a great visionary. He was greatly admired, but anyone could take advantage of him because of his lack of intention. Without loyal people working for him and supporting him he was pretty useless. I am just quoting this example because he was someone of whom it could be said that was so out of proportion in his decision-making process for it almost to be disharmonious. He would not grade issues as to whether they were important or unimportant, with the result that he would often be distracted away in all sorts of irrelevant matters. In fact he was never at all clear what issue he was dealing with at the time. In meetings an issue that someone thought they were dealing with, he would handle in such a way that it didn’t seem to exist as an issue, it just created a great fog. He was also very weak because anyone could persuade him. He would leave things in the air a lot. I am just asking the question whether a decision-making process which is so much out of proportion could be regarded as disharmonious. He failed to recognise the relative importance of issues.  

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There are three stages of the decision-making process and each stage breaks down into two further stages because of the effort and the shape aspect of attention. So that gives us six initiatives in the decision-making sequence. A person’s pattern of initiative may be equally divided, more or less, between those six. This applies to very few people but it does happen that some people have a fairly even distribution. They may be understood as not having so much character, as being ‘overall’: taking everything into account they are often respected in a team as being coordinators, or good all-rounders, to use a cricket analogy. Now managers do tend to be either good batsmen, good bowlers or wicket-keepers – something that has individuality. It varies but different business cultures tend to want one more than another. You tend to find managers who will perhaps give emphasis to one or two of the six initiatives but nevertheless have a good backing up of the other four. But then you get others who are at an extreme like the one I have quoted where two or three of the initiatives are so neglected and the others so much emphasised that you say it is out of proportion. It’s almost like saying that we have somebody who is an all-round character, and then we have somebody who is so extreme as to be an eccentric. For example someone who has a lot of attention wants to avoid taking action, wants to be able to function in a complete research environment. The meetings that they enjoy most are where there isn’t much likelihood of their having to agree to taking any action.