Making Good Decisions Quickly

This resource first appeared in issue #106 on 22 Jan 2022 and has tags Strategy: Making Decisions, Strategy: Working with Stakeholders, Managing A Team: Other

The Decision-Making Pendulum - Candost Dagdeviren
Our Role in Effective Decision Making - Kathy Keating
Everyday Decisions, Done Dirt Cheap - Matt Schellhas

Dagdeviren talks about the decision-making pendulum, the spectrum of decision-making processes ranging from authority (“Because I said so”), through advice and consent, to consensus decision making (“So say we all”). The processes at the extremes aren’t great for either the teams or the decisions that likely result (I don’t agree with everything Manager-Tools says, but I think they’re 100% right about consensus - consensus is a desirable outcome of a decision-making process, but it is a bad choice for a decision-making process). Within the middle, the important thing is that the decision-making process is explicit, input is gathered and seen to be taken seriously, and decisions are communicated clearly.

That input gathering and discussion-facilitation phase before and after a decision made takes some practice. Keating gives us (from the point of view of an inveterate introvert!) an overview of facilitating discussions, which can be especially tricky in the cross-disciplinary world we work in, so that the full range of ideas and information becomes available and shared.

And Shellhas gives us a bit of breathing room when it comes to decision making. The “best” decision is unknowable beforehand, when you actually need the decision; even in retrospect, determining whether it was best available is usually still impossible. It’s not a power given to we mere mortals to watch all possible timelines unfold.

But there’s often one or more nearly-tied, “good enough” decisions available. Unless a given decision has huge ramifications — which does happen, but isn’t the common case — quickly making a good-enough decision in some consistent and transparent way (maybe, say, given some underlying strategy and priorities!) is probably better for you and the team than agonizing over trying to optimize over the unknowable.