Strategy. Innovation. Brand.

decision making processes

Better Decisions for Your Company – 2

explain it to yourselfYesterday we looked at the first three steps in Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Improving Your Organization’s Decision-Making. (The book is here; the white paper is here). Let’s look at the last two steps today.

Step 4 – Build an Organization. The first three steps outline the decision making process. If you do all three of them well, the decision quality will improve. But, in addition to making decisions, you need to create an organization that is tuned for decision making. This especially affects those small but frequent operational decisions.

The authors suggest that the starting point is fairly simple: judge investments based on their ability to improve decisions and execution. You may want to include other criteria as well – competitive positioning, return on capital, and so on. But always be sure to include a decision quality objective as well.

The authors illustrate their point with the war for talent. Here’s the difference:

  • Traditional approach: Are we winning the war for talent?
  • Decision-centered approach: Do we put our best people in the jobs where they can have the biggest impact on decisions?

Looking at your organization from this perspective will change your understanding of how your best people should be deployed. You may find that executive and managerial positions are less “decision-critical” than you thought and many operational positions are more important. You’ll probably want to deploy your best people in different ways.

Step 5 – Embed Decision Capabilities. This one is “about making change stick” and runs in parallel with the other steps. In other words, it’s not the last step in a chronological sequence. Rather, it’s a concurrent step. You build a foundation, engage your best leaders, identify the decision-critical positions, redeploy people, and set audacious goals.

There are obstacles, of course. You may find that important decisions makers (and decision centers) may lose authority as decisions are pushed down and out. Other people may not want to change. They’re comfortable with their current routines. They may not change at all or they may apply the new method of decision making only to the easy decisions. These are all predictable issues. Be prepared for them.

What happens if you successfully complete all five steps? Performance will probably improve on key metrics like customer satisfaction, revenues, and profits. More importantly, you may just set the organization into a virtuous circle (as opposed to a vicious circle). Good decisions produce better decisions which attracts better talent which produce better decisions which … well, you get the idea.

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