The Three Prongs of how the we make decisions

Oneg Rabbi Fine Art is a project of the Minian Hebraica Autogestionado. Below is an article I wrote—which we will translate into Spanish and publish on the Minian's Blog in a few days—about how the Minian makes decisions, including how we we manage our Oneg Rabbi Fine Art initiative. Enjoy learning about how we think :)

Every group needs a core philosophy for how it works.

Some organizations have a philosophy of "We do what the most powerful person says."

Other organizations have a culture of bureaucracy in which decisions seem to never be made.

Other organizations have a cloud of absolute secrecy, where a cabal of people somehow make decisions in a way that no one really understands.

As the Minian grows, one decision we are faced with is: how should we make decisions?

Here is our answer.

The practical answer starts with another question (Jews! They always ask the question behind the question!): what is the philosophy behind your practical organization.

And ours revolves around three very deep prongs that are uncompromisable for the Minian.

The first is the TORAH. We are an orthodox Jewish Minian, and orthodox life puts the Torah front and center. As is often repeated: when love of the Torah disappears, so does Judaism. The Minian, in our governance, will never choose to make decisions or act in a way that goes against the Torah.

The second is FISCAL TRANSPARENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY. The Minian has an obligation to its donors and those whom it pays to make sure it has enough money. Not only are there various people who receive salaries every month to make our amazing activities happen, but we pay lots of expenses to different parties. And of course, those who give us money, we have the obligation to use it responsibly. No one serious would ever even consider donating money to or support an institution that isn't committed to using its funds responsibly. This financial transparency and responsibility takes many different shapes, including: opening our books to active donor or member of our Comision Directiva that has an interest in it; regular reports on our financial status to our Comision Directiva; our approach to budgeting is to only spend money within budgets for those certain activities, and to define budgets only based on what we are conservatively confident we can raise; and so forth. We're even updating our system, as we speak, to make this system stronger (this is an impetus to writing this document!)

The third prong is LAW AND ORDER. In far too many communities we know, there is one person who sees themselves above the rules and protocols and norms for everyone else in the community. Indeed, it's too common to have various people who see themselves as above the rules for everyone else. "Taxes are for common people" as one important American politician once said. The Minian, however, takes the other approach: we have rules and no one is above them. Even the rabbi, even the President of the Minian (yours truly!).

What do these three principles look like in practice? We are trying to bring them together using one of our favorite structures: the RACI. This structure, in short, defines--for any given issue or area--in a hierarchical manner who will make the decision for that area (the "A"="Accountable"), the person financially responsible. Then that person must discuss it with the "R"="Responsible", the person who day-to-day implements the decision, because they have their feet on the ground to know the reality of the situation. The "A"="Accountable" decision-maker then needs to get advice from the people who need to be "C"="Consulted" on that issue. And then, for that issue, there are various people who are not necessarily involved in the decision-making, but they need to be "I"="Informed" of what decision was made.

Within the Minian, we use the RACI structure to have various committees: we have our House Purchase Committee (led by Jack, Marcos, and Jimmy), our HR/People Management Committee (led by JonyN and myself), we have our Political Relations with Hebraica committee (led by Luis and Marcos), for example. We're expanding this structure because it's working well.

Does all of this sound interesting to you? We're always expanding our team, so feel free to reach out to us if you might be interested in working with us in Pilar, Buenos Aires!

This article also appeared on the Minian's Blog.