Why Minimize Management Decision Time

This resource first appeared in issue #38 on 21 Aug 2020 and has tags Strategy: Making Decisions

Why Minimize Management Decision Time - Johanna Rothman

I’ve mentioned before that my wife, trained as an emergency-room nurse, and myself, trained as an academic, have very different default approaches to decision making under uncertainty. I fall more under the “I’ll just do a quick literature review and read these two books first” school. She has what Google calls “a bias towards action”. Both are perfectly good approaches in the right context.

Unfortunately, as a manger, my default stretching out of decision making - and savouring every minute of it - isn’t great for the team, for a number of reasons. Many of us brought up in the research side of research computing likely suffer from the same problem. As Rothman’s article points out, it has real costs for the team:

Every request for more information interrupts the team’s current work.
More importantly, the team starts to explore future work, not finish the current work.
The managers lose their context to make a decision quickly.

The last is subtle but real - one can get too wrapped up in the analysis and lose sight of the immediate problem at hand.

This article discusses the “why”s of minimizing decision making time. As a “how”, I’m trying to give myself strict time limits for decisions, with shorter time limits for decisions that can easily be undone, and longer limits for those that can’t.