The decision making component – in detail
How the business expects people to take decisions in their work.
Part of the building the organisation layer
INTRODUCTION
Decisions control the flow of work in a business. Every day there are situations to understand, options to evaluate and decisions to make.
Decision making spans the entire organisation. It runs from high volume micro-decisions to big bets that shape the future of a business. Being intentional about decision making is key to this component of the B3 framework.
Be explicit about who can take what decisions and who needs to be involved. Strive for a bias towards devolving decision making to enable greater agility and pace.
Creating clear boundaries for decision making autonomy unleashes latent potential in people and teams.
Set out “guardrails” for decision making by defining proportionate processes and make sure they’re used. Work out which of the eight decision making models you want to use and teach teams about their use.
Expose decision making and its supporting rationale widely. This drives transparency and widens situational awareness in the business, improving future decision making.
In detail
This all sounds a bit wu wu. Why should I care about decision making?
Read this article by Clay Parker Jones – “Why Nothing Gets Done Around Here” (free registration needed).
It explains how bad decision making affects organisations and why you should pay attention.
What are the eight decision making models?
Consulting firm Nobl identifies eight ways that decisions can be made in business.
There are pros and cons to each approach.
Different ways of making decisions will be appropriate for specific decisions at specific times.
The eight models are:
- Autocratic – decide by yourself and tell the team the decision
- Avoidant – deciding to not make a decision
- Consensus – reaching a compromise solution that everyone is happy enough with
- Consent – reaching a compromise solution that no-one objects to
- Consultative – getting inputs from others but then making the decision yourself
- Delegation – getting a the best-placed single person to decide
- Democratic – majority voting among a group to reach a decision
- Stochastic – random choice when there’s little discernible difference and low risk
What does a decision process look like?
There’s no single way of setting out a decision process.
The most effective processes give clarity on who’s going to decide and how they are going to get the advice they need to make a good decision:
The B3 framework recommends a consultative decision making process centred around advice.
The key steps in this kind of process would be:
- Identification of the decision maker for this particular decision – who will decide in the end?
- Advice seeking – who are the experts and stakeholders who need to contribute insight?
- Making the decision – assimilating the insights received, but not being bound to follow them.
- Communicating the decision – explaining what was decided and the reasoning. If advice wasn’t followed, this is the time to say why – helping increase transparency and build trust.
- Implement and review – gathering post-implementation insights to feed into future decisions.
Here’s an example of what this looks like in practice in a decision making process from Slack.
And this is a more detailed look at a progressive decision making process.
Background reading
- The Decision Maker by Dennis Bakke (book)
- Senior executives must give up their “decision rights” (article)
- What is decision making? (article)
- Why People Fail to Make Important Choices (article)
- Deciding on deciding (article)
- How to Make Decisions that are EPICS (article)
- How to Make Good Group Decisions (report)
- Guide to Making Better Decisions (article)
- Decision Making (article)
- The Power of Collaborative Decision-Making (article)
- Decision-Making Practice (article)
- Why Nothing Gets Done Around Here (article)
- Decision-Making: Autonomy versus Speed (article)
