Further, the stages, or points in the decision-making process where decisions are made are often unclear. However slow and cumbersome decision-making may be in the United States Congress, for example, one has a sense of how the process works and when issues will be debated and decisions made. Colleges and universities often work with very different decision-making processes from that of formalized decision-making bodies. In addition, the path to reaching a decision frequently differs from issue to issue. In large part the lack of a regular decision-making process is due to the “loosely coupled” (Weick, 1976) nature of academic organizations and relates to the earlier point about who makes decisions. The idea of shared governance assumes that different individuals participate in structures that lead to jointly agreed-upon decisions. However, in a loosely coupled organization where there is no clear or systematic decision-making process, the possibility for misunderstanding is significant.