It's bugged me for a long time — the process of decision making.
Sometimes I think I'm quite bad at making decisions and I take too long to make them.
That's absolutely true at times.
But when in a team, there is sometimes a sense that decisions are made by a group. You get together as a team and collaborate to make a decision.
If the team is healthy, you collaborate and you listen and you give each other time to share thoughts. Great ideas and suggestions can come from anywhere.
But decisions… those can be harder.
In reality, most teams are not purely democratic, so decisions are rarely ultimately made by the team as a whole. They are made by a person on the team.
Often, all too often, in a team, things fall down because it isn't clear who the person to ultimately make the decision is.
Sometimes it's because the person who makes the decision isn't qualified or doesn't have the right information.
Sometimes it’s to do with the health of the team — the psychological safety of putting your neck on the line. Toxic cultures can make decision-making a more political or emotional challenge than necessary.
But from what I've seen, often it's because the person who needs to make the decision isn't aware that they are the ones who need to make the decision in the first place. There is ambiguity and misunderstanding within the team.
In startups and small businesses, often one of the few advantages over bigger companies is speed — you can move more quickly than a thousand-person behemoth because you can strip away the politics and bureaucracy and risk aversion that larger organisations tend to accrete.
You don't have a lot else: you have less money, fewer people, and less time. Which is why speed is not just advantageous but necessary.
While there's a lot of information and tooling around building and designing things faster, there's relatively little about making decisions faster and more effectively, even in a small team.
It could be the difference between life and death. Sometimes a decision doesn't just wait for hours. It waits for days, weeks, months, if not years.
Figuring out how to change this is a constant endeavour of mine. And I believe primarily it starts with making sure it's clear who makes the decision.
Inevitable criticism
It's worth bearing in mind that very rarely does anybody get criticised for not making a decision.
It's very easy to criticise a wrong decision being made, because you can usually see it play out on a given time horizon.
A decision not being made though: in most companies this can be invisible.
The very absence of something makes it hard to pin down. You rarely see the negative impacts of indecision directly. But you ultimately pay the price.
Which is why a culture where decision-making is
