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 optimised for both quality and speed is crucial to success.
If decision-making creates more fear and anger and unhappiness within a team, the incentive is for people to back off from decisions being made entirely. This of course is detrimental to your team and everyone working there.
It is therefore paramount that you create a culture where rapid decision-making is praised, and where indecision is flushed out and highlighted so it can be addressed with urgency.
The 70% rule
There are a couple of frameworks that I think are helpful here.
First is the 70% rule: wait until you have 70% information to make a decision. Less information risks a poor decision. More information risks waiting too long.
It’s really simple and easy to remember. I wouldn’t get too hung up on how to measure 70% — I often can sense this when I start to build enough conviction on something.
Disagree and commit
While I’m not the biggest fan of Jeff Bezos, he oversaw some incredibly valuable leadership principles that were instilled at Amazon.
“Disagree and commit” is a phrase I use often — even half jokingly with my partner when choosing a restaurant for dinner.
You may not agree on the choice, but once the decision is made you all get behind it and support it with the same commitment you would have for any other choice that was made, including your own.
DRI: the Directly Responsible Individual
The last framework, for today at least, is one I've also long been fascinated about: Apple's DRI framework, the "directly responsible individual" framework.
I am not aware of this being used at many companies — maybe it flies under the radar with a different name, or perhaps it’s just not employed with the same level of commitment and discipline as at Apple.
The bigger a team gets, the more ambiguity that can arise with who makes each decision. But this can even occur as soon as your team grows from one (just you) to two.
Deciding who makes the decision is often the most important decision of all.
All too often, the answer is "not me".
But if not you, then who?
I don't believe much has been written about the DRI “framework”, but is worthy of more investigation.
At least as far as I understand it, every project, every area, every little thing that needs work, resources, and decision-making, has a directly responsible individual who owns it. This stems from the CEO down to every department and area of the business. Of course this benefits management on many levels, but it also helps reduce a lot of ambiguity when trying to pin down who should make any particular decision.
In a world of well-meaning committees, boards, and panels, responsibility for the decision making can get lost. In some organisations perhaps this is on purpose.
But assuming you want to build a robust and effective and successful organisation that makes the world better, I suspect it would not hurt to clarify individual responsibility for at least the most important decisions.
If you have any approaches you've seen or employed that have helped you make better decisions more quickly, please let me know. I'd love to hear more.