The decision making paradox

Why is decision making important?

One of the most challenging skills that agile teams need to learn is how to make good decisions. Organisations provide little training around decision making, and we are just expected to know how to do it.

We make LOTS of decisions

Various US news sites estimate that an average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day*. Yes, you heard correctly. This number may sound absurd to you — it sure did to me.

Have a think about the decisions that you’ve made just in the hours you’ve been awake today: for me it came when I was still in bed - I decided to hit the snooze button several times. You probably decided what clothes you were going to wear, what to eat for breakfast and how you travelled to work today. And you also made a decision to spend your time reading this article.

Think about the decisions we make in the regular cadence of a sprint cycle, where a bunch of different decisions need to be made by the team, like deciding:

• sprint goals and priorities
• on acceptance criteria
• on estimates
• who will work on what
• on pairing
• what improvements to work on during the next sprint

And these are just related to the Scrum process itself, but there are hundreds more related to the actual product a team is building. When teams make this many decisions as part of their day to day activities, we need to make sure they are well skilled in being able to make good decisions.

But decision making is challenging

Decision-making is challenging even in the best of circumstances. Trying to balance speed of making decisions with the quality of the decisions and making sure all voices are heard is a tough balancing act.

• How do you keep everyone aligned with the decisions they made?
• What kinds of decisions are suitable for individual decisions versus team ones?

A book called Decide & Deliver found that…

“Once you’ve got 7 people in a decision-making group, each additional member reduces decision effectiveness by 10%.”

This explains why a group of 17 or more rarely makes any decisions.

Lack of techniques for decision making

Knowing how many decisions we make and the complexities behind making them in a team environment, it made me wonder how many practical techniques we have available in the community to support teams.

If we look at retrospectives, there are in excess of 100 techniques available from from websites such as Retromat and Tasty Cupcakes. If we look at prioritisation, there are over 20 techniques available, with Folding Burritos publishing a comprehensive list of many types.

Now, think of how many techniques you know to help with decision making. I came up with three: collaborative decision making, dot voting and fist of five. I’m sure there are a few more that I’ve missed. Let’s assume I have, but even so it highlights a paradox: in a world where we are constantly making many ‘thousands’ of decisions each day, why are there so few tools to help us make decisions effectively?

When you consider the diversity of the existing decision making tools teams typically use across a typical decision making spectrum, we find that all of them are geared towards achieving consensus-based outcomes.

But what if teams:

• Are feeling paralysed with the speed in which they’re making decisions and need a faster way to maintain momentum?
• Are experiencing team morale issues and getting frustrated by trying to get agreement for every decision?
• Wanted an alternative approach to making decisions where gaining consensus wasn’t always necessarily required?

In my next two posts, I explore an alternative decision making approach that lives somewhere between consensus and edict: consent, and talk about a new consent-based technique to help teams make fast, good enough decisions.