You Can't Always Get What You Want (But You Might Just Get What You Need)

Why consensus building in complex collaborations means nobody gets everything - and why that's exactly the point

The Rolling Stones understood something about collaboration that many organisations still struggle with. Released in 1968, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" wasn't just a countercultural anthem - it was an accidentally brilliant thesis on consensus building. Because when Mick Jagger sang about not getting what you want but sometimes getting what you need, he'd captured the essential truth of working across boundaries: in genuinely collaborative environments, nobody gets everything they came for. And that's not failure. That's the mechanism working.

Most organisations approach consensus building as if it's a problem to solve - a necessary compromise between competing interests, where everyone gives up something to reach agreement. But what if we've been thinking about it wrong? What if consensus isn't about everyone getting less, but about everyone getting something different: not what they wanted, but what the collaboration actually needs?
 

The Compromise Paradox
Here's where it gets interesting. Traditional thinking treats compromise as concession - you wanted A, I wanted B, we settle for a mediocre version of both. But research on consensus-driven decision-making in diverse groups shows something more sophisticated happening. In genuinely collaborative environments, the process isn't about splitting the difference. It's about discovering what none of the individual stakeholders could see alone.

Wikipedia's description of consensus decision-making identifies key characteristics: collaboration, cooperation, egalitarianism, inclusion, and participation. Notice what's absent from that list? "Getting your way." The process isn't designed to ensure anyone's initial position wins - it's designed to ensure everyone's perspective shapes what emerges.

Harvard's Program on Negotiation research demonstrates this elegantly: mutually beneficial agreements emerge not when parties meet in the middle, but when they make trade-offs based on different priorities. You care deeply about timeline; I care deeply about quality standards. You get schedule certainty; I get specification control. Neither of us got our complete original vision - but the collaboration got what it needed to succeed.

Why Consensus Fails: The Three Hidden Problems

Through decades of work with complex collaborations - joint ventures, alliances, partnerships, major transformations - we've identified three problems that prevent organisations from building genuine consensus. Problems most conflict management approaches completely miss.

The Courage Deficit. People know what needs to be said but lack the psychological safety to say it. In consensus building, this is lethal. If stakeholders can't voice their actual concerns - if they're performing agreement whilst holding private reservations - you haven't built consensus. You've built a façade that will collapse under pressure.

The Licence Problem. Even when people have courage, organisational structures often deny them permission to engage in genuine consensus building. Decision authority isn't clear. Some voices are systematically privileged whilst others are marginalised. The meeting structure allocates 45 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for "discussion" - which isn't consensus building, it's information transmission with token interaction.

The Reinforcement Paradox. Perhaps most fundamentally, organisations treat consensus building as damage control - how do we reach agreement without too much conflict? But that frame misses what makes consensus valuable. When done well, working through substantive disagreement to reach genuine consensus doesn't just prevent relationship damage. It builds collaborative capability. Each contentious subject successfully navigated makes the next one easier. The relationship strengthens precisely because it survived disagreement.

What "Getting What You Need" Actually Looks Like
So what does it mean for a collaboration to get what it needs when no individual stakeholder gets what they want? It looks different from traditional compromise in several ways.

First, the outcome is genuinely novel - not a watered-down version of anyone's original position, but an integrated solution that incorporates insights from multiple perspectives. Research on collaborative partnerships emphasises that genuine collaboration creates mutual benefit through collective problem-solving, not through splitting the difference.

Second, stakeholders can explain why the outcome serves the collaboration's purpose even if it differs from their initial preferences. This is critical. If people leave consensus building unclear about why the decision makes sense, you haven't built consensus - you've manufactured compliance.

Third, the process builds capability for future collaboration. Academic research on community-based participatory research identifies power-sharing, co-learning, mutual respect, and reciprocity as foundational principles. When consensus building embodies these principles, teams don't just reach agreement - they develop collective intelligence that didn't exist before.

The Rolling Stones Were Onto Something
Perhaps Jagger and Richards didn't set out to write a treatise on organisational collaboration. But they captured something important: the recognition that what we want and what we need aren't always the same thing. And sometimes not getting what we want - especially when everyone doesn't get what they want - creates space for something better to emerge.

In complex collaborations, the stakeholder who arrives certain they know the right answer is often the one who learns the most - because genuine consensus building surfaces perspectives they hadn't considered, challenges assumptions they didn't know they were making, and reveals possibilities they couldn't see alone.

This requires courage to voice actual concerns, not performed agreement. It requires licence - formal permission structures that authorise genuine challenge. And it requires reframing consensus building from damage control to capability development.

When these conditions exist, consensus building transforms from painful compromise into collaborative discovery. Nobody gets exactly what they wanted. Everyone contributes to what the collaboration needs. And the Rolling Stones soundtrack the whole thing.

As it turns out, you can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime - with courage, with structural support, and with genuine commitment to collaborative purpose - you just might find you get what you need.
 

Rolling Stones image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

References
Consensus decision-making - Wikipedia
https://www.pon.harvard.edu/research-home/
Consensus development for healthcare professionals. PMC (PubMed Central).