Deciding how to make decisions is the first step in improving them…
Why is it that some decisions seem to be really painful? Those discussions that seem to go on forever and even when we think the decision is made, it ends up being unpicked and remade again.
A while ago, I was asked, at quite late notice, to drop what I was planning to do for a workshop with a client, and instead to help them with something more pressing.
Apparently, for a couple of months they’d been in discussions with a rival about the potential to merge. The talks seemed to be going around in circles, but because they were ongoing, other strategic decisions were already starting to get delayed, and frustrations and anxiety were beginning to rise.
I introduced them to a simple framework for describing four possible outcomes: a good, successful merger; a bad, destructive merger; a good “no” decision; and a bad, perhaps even bitter no.
Then we worked on what they’d need to do or what would need to be true, to get the good outcomes and avoid the bad, for both yes and no scenarios. The exercise helped shape their decision criteria, the questions to raise, and the tests to make around the choices in front of them.
Within a couple of weeks of that session, both parties came to recognise that a merger wasn’t the right solution for either of them, but a very good “no” was absolutely possible and could give most of the benefits anyway.
No doubt they’d have got to the no eventually, but by setting out the most important factors in the decision, they saved themselves months of wrangling and almost certainly reached a far better no than they would otherwise have done.
In a different but related example, I was “riding shotgun” with a leader from another charity at their executive meeting, in which we were trying to reboot a project that had been repeatedly delayed.
He asked the group: “What are the most important things we need to deliver?”
As we went around the table, every response was different, some were in conflict with others, a couple in direct disagreement, and yet nobody seemed phased by this. The expectation seemed to be that we’d take all this feedback and somehow come back next time with a magic proposal that ticked all the boxes.
This was why there had been no progress, and my mind raced to try and find something, anything, that might help.
Thankfully it came up with a suggestion, and on a nearby flipchart I wrote: “From which perspective should we answer this question?” The four I offered were: personal preference, departmental needs, current year budgets, long term strategy.
I was told afterwards that it was one of the most interesting conversations they’d had for ages, and I’m not surprised: they were thoughtful, nuanced, and eventually got to a really good collective answer, after which the priorities for the initiative fell out ridiculously easily, almost like an afterthought.
Once we’ve decided how to make decisions, those decisions become far, far easier to make. Because then we can just gather the information and the answer becomes clear. That’s why we can productionise those decisions we already know how to make, with standard templates for investments and business cases and the like.
The problem comes when we don’t have those criteria; when we’re making a type of decision we’ve not made often before, because we’ll probably all start off with our own, very different, criteria and perspectives.
Take Girlguiding and their decision about to whom they should sell some of their activity centres: it’s not the kind of decision they’re used to making, there’s no internal template to follow, and their commercial agents and advisors probably weren’t used to having so many other stakeholders and non-financial factors to consider either.
Hindsight is 20:20 but this is why it’s so important to spend time thinking about how to make decisions before we throw ourselve in a start making them. And it’s not just so we can become better at making them, quicker and more consistent, but also so we can be more transparent about how we made them with our people and our stakeholders.
Especially when we’re making big ones that are outside the norm, whether selling an asset or developing a strategy, closing a service or expanding into a whole new area of impact or income.
When it comes to speed, quality, and their subsequent engagement, how we make decisions is ultimately far more important than what we decide. And certainly from my own experience, spending a bit more time upfront on the how, can save a helluva lot of time and stress later when you come to debate the what.