Decision Making Time Savers
With things changing every day, you and your leadership team don’t have a lot of time to make decisions. How can you make purposeful, realistic decisions faster? Consider these ideas:
Who’s involved: Simplify and speed decision making by involving the right people and the right number of people, for the right reasons.
Is this a decision that your group has to make? Or could it be delegated to people closer to the action? (Thanks, @herve.tiberghien for recent reference to this idea.)
Too few to have diverse perspectives? Too many to be efficient? Seems the optimal number is “an odd number close to five,” according to synthesis by @sheila.margolis.
Are you involving people for routine, historic or hierarchical reasons only? Because some individuals have a conscious or unconscious need to hold back information or protect their territory, or CYA? Ain’t nobody got time for that, not in a crisis, not even in business as usual. Bring this up, work on trust and move on. As @lia.keel posted in a webinar today “If not now, when?”
Are you confusing decision makers and decision implementers? If you as decision makers are conscious of implementation realities, and if you empower implementation teams to deal with the details, then you only need decision makers at the decision table (or in the decision video chat, as the case may be).
Use a blueprint: Leverage learning from past decision making to expedite the next big call you need to make. Reflect on a recent good decision, document the questions you asked, and the order in which you asked them. There’s the sketch of your blueprint. (See this article for more on that.)
Identify & start with your “clincher questions:” Especially in times of crisis, there are one or two questions that narrow down your options immediately. Ask these first and avoid unnecessary analysis and debate. What are your clincher questions?
For most organizations, the first clincher question has to do with compliance or ethics. For some, purpose or values.
If you provide an essential service during this pandemic or always, your clincher question is likely to be about fulfilling customer -- and therefore society's --needs.
And if you’re simply struggling to survive, your clincher question is going to be about affordability, plain and simple.
Go slow to go fast: Credit goes to the Insight Principles team for this advice. The idea is that taking even a bit more time upfront saves you from spinning later. They have a ton to offer on this topic. Here are a few easily-to-try ideas on this subject:
Before diving in, give yourselves a few minutes of silence. Breathe. Calm your minds. Notice what you’re thinking about. Get ready to start fresh. You’ll be better able to move beyond the dynamics of your prior discussion and be more open to new insights and options.
Move away from the spreadsheet and slide deck. Go for a walk, talk to your kids, play in the kitchen or in the garden. Get some peace and perspective, even if for 30 minutes. The insights that tell us what we need to know come when we’re not actively forcing them.
Don’t rush the clincher questions. Start the discussion by being still and seeing what comes up. Wonder out loud. Be curious about what others see. Trust intuition that you simply know is right.
Practicing quicker decision making today can build tools, trust, mindsets and habits that live on into tomorrow.
What do you think? Let’s connect — I’m curious about your experience.
