Arbitration

Short definition

A choice that designates a priority and names what is sacrificed to it, in a way attributable to a body or a person and to a moment.

Full definition

In ordinary corporate usage, the word broadly designates any decision taken in a meeting on a disputed subject — including a compromise formulation that relegates nothing. That is what makes it ambiguous: two participants can leave the same session saying "the arbitration has been made" and pointing to different things.

In the articles on this blog, the term retains only the strong sense: there is arbitration when the counterpart is stated — the promise that will be narrower, the delay accepted, the volume given up, the opportunity refused. An arbitration therefore has three marks: a named priority, a named loss, an identifiable author.

A fourth mark belongs to field usage rather than to the definition: an arbitration practically exists only if it holds. A choice reopened as soon as it displeases is indistinguishable, for the teams, from an absence of choice.

Usage in the field

The term comes into play in discussions about committees' mandates, about management's role, about decision minutes and about the causes of friction in execution.

Synonyms and variants

"Settling it", "deciding for good", "choosing a direction". The weak-sense turns of phrase are recognizable by the absence of a complement: "we arbitrated" without "so we are giving up".

Not to be confused with

• Synthesis — a formulation that holds several points of view together; it seeks a middle way, where arbitration relegates one rationale to second place.
• Prioritization — the ordering of a set of already accepted items; arbitration settles between rationales that cannot coexist.
• Soft decision — Soft decision — a formulation recorded as a decision that relegates nothing; it occupies arbitration's place in the documents.
• Consultation — gathering the rationales present; it prepares arbitration, it doesn't constitute it.
• Roadmap — Roadmap — a short view of the major subjects retained over a horizon; it publishes arbitrations taken elsewhere, without taking them.
• Commando mode — Commando mode — a bounded slot reserved for subjects whose value is already established; it handles only what calls for no arbitration.

Examples

"Serious arbitration therefore doesn't look for the sentence that pleases everyone. It names a priority and accepts what that relegates to second place." — the usage in the sense retained here.

"It lets someone say: this choice was made, for this reason, by this person or this body, at this moment." — the mark of attribution.

Ambiguities / debates

The strong sense has a cost that ordinary usage lets you avoid: it makes a decision contestable and designates someone responsible. That is why the weak sense isn't merely an imprecision of language — it does a service.

Unsettled: the collective part. A committee can arbitrate without a single person being the author of the choice, and the requirement of attribution then applies to the body, which weakens the mark accordingly.