Be aware of your decisions in the first place! It’s really easy to get so caught up in our natural habits of decision-making that we forget that anything out of the ordinary is happening. Try to set up tripwires in your team meetings, Slack chats, and other everyday venues for communication to flag when an important fork in the road is before you and resist the natural pressure people will feel to get to resolution immediately. Then commit to a clear process of framing the choice, gathering information, considering alternatives, and choosing a path forward.
Match the level of information-gathering and analysis you give a decision to its stakes. Often organizations have rote processes set up for analysis that aren’t actually connected to anything worth worrying about, while much more consequential decisions are made in a single meeting or in a memo from the CEO. Try to establish a discipline of asking how much of your/your team’s time it’s worth spending on getting a decision right. Try to ensure that every piece of knowledge your team collects has at least one clear, easily foreseen use case in a decision-making context, and dump any that are just taking up space.
Try to structure decisions for flexibility and option value. Look for ways to run experiments and give yourself an out if they don’t work, ways to condition a decision on some other event or decision so that you aren’t backed into making a choice before you have to, ways to hedge against multiple scenarios. Obviously, there will be situations when there is one correct choice and you need to go all-in on that choice. But in my experience those are pretty rare, and clients are more likely to make the opposite error of overcommitting to decision sequences that overly narrow the set of reasonable future options and cause problems down the line because of that.
Be aware of your decisions in the first place! It’s really easy to get so caught up in our natural habits of decision-making that we forget that anything out of the ordinary is happening. Try to set up tripwires in your team meetings, Slack chats, and other everyday venues for communication to flag when an important fork in the road is before you and resist the natural pressure people will feel to get to resolution immediately. Then commit to a clear process of framing the choice, gathering information, considering alternatives, and choosing a path forward.
Match the level of information-gathering and analysis you give a decision to its stakes. Often organizations have rote processes set up for analysis that aren’t actually connected to anything worth worrying about, while much more consequential decisions are made in a single meeting or in a memo from the CEO. Try to establish a discipline of asking how much of your/your team’s time it’s worth spending on getting a decision right. Try to ensure that every piece of knowledge your team collects has at least one clear, easily foreseen use case in a decision-making context, and dump any that are just taking up space.
Try to structure decisions for flexibility and option value. Look for ways to run experiments and give yourself an out if they don’t work, ways to condition a decision on some other event or decision so that you aren’t backed into making a choice before you have to, ways to hedge against multiple scenarios. Obviously, there will be situations when there is one correct choice and you need to go all-in on that choice. But in my experience those are pretty rare, and clients are more likely to make the opposite error of overcommitting to decision sequences that overly narrow the set of reasonable future options and cause problems down the line because of that.