Decisions that don’t suck
Like all humans, I spend my day making decisions. What socks to wear, whether to eat greens or chocolate. Most of my decisions happen at a place called Future Super, where I work. The decisions I make there are more complicated than the decisions I make at home. They impact the days of the people around me. Yet until this week, I’d never really dived into how the team sees the decisions I’m making or how we make decisions as a team.
I’ve never worked in a place that’s nailed decision making. We’ve all worked in teams where decisions are made poorly. Either by the highest paid person in the room (or the one with the most equity or the loudest voice) or those teams where no one knows who is making a decision and everything stops because it’s a miasma of confusion. Neither of these are good.
This matters because decisions are by far the most important thing we do as people. And they’re by far the most important thing we do at work. While companies idolize good ideas, a good decision maker will trump a good ideas person any day.
Why? Good decisions don’t guarantee a good outcome but they make a good outcome more likely.
Overtime, good decision makers are more valuable than those who roll out of bed with luck. More important: good decision makers much better to work with.
What’s the problem?
For the millions of pieces of advice on better decision making, none have tackled the fact that ‘decisions’ is a ridiculously broad topic. So much so that the word’s almost meaningless.
When the team started talking about how we make decisions, I knew we’d only get somewhere good if we spent time identifying what about our decision making wasn’t good. That meant we needed to be able to float around in ambiguity and diverse thoughts for a while.
It’s in this spirit, that we held our first session: auditing how we’re currently making decisions as a team.
The full team took part: Danny, Amanda, Jake, Andrew, Mariela, Bec and I.
Per usual, I took random pictures of them they didn’t know about throughout the session. Here’s what our sessions look like these days.
Let’s develop a point of view
The purpose of our first session was to get a lay of the land. I was curious how each person viewed the decisions they and others are making (think everyone was).
What do they think is working? What isn’t? What decisions have a clear owner? What decisions don’t? What’s the impact on morale and momentum when decisions are made without reason or clarity?
What we learned
This first session really worked because we all came in with the right spirit. The virtual room was buzzing with curiosity and open mindedness which made the discussion far more productive. Everyone was asking questions, there wasn’t a whiff of blame or shame being passed around and we were all excited by the change we could make as a team.
What‘s working
From the notes of the session it’s pretty clear that we have some of the basics right.
- No HIPPO. We’re not making decisions according to the loudest or highest paid person in the room.
- There’s fairly good clarity on who makes decisions within our core areas (social media, copy, creative strategy, design and dev). When there’s less clarity on the decision owner, we make the decisions graciously with no antagonism of ‘protecting my turf’.
- We’re open about the how and why of our decisions (most of the time)
- We’re constantly trying to improve and know that this stuff gets better through reflection and trying new things.
What’s not working
From there, we started to find areas that are holding us back. This chat allows us to see what to focus our efforts on.
- We find it harder to make decisions quickly and as well when we’re making decisions we haven’t made before or need cross-functional input.
- We could get better at sitting with ambiguity so that we have time to find the right solution vs the first one (note: this is different than stalling on making a decision).
- And there’s little consistency in how we make decisions. ICYMI: we lack a clear process and this project is worthwhile.
IOO*: Decisions that don’t suck
Now I can see more clearly what we as a unique, individual team mean when we talk about decisions that don’t suck. Our audit made what we want to achieve from this project less theoretical to me. It grounded the components we want in the people we are and what we’re trying to achieve.
Elements we want:
- Everyone who is a part of the process plays an active role.
- We thrash early by bringing divergent ideas and opinions to the table as early as we can. We do this to frame decisions in a clear world views. Note: myopia is a killjoy.
- There’s a clear process that reduces the likelihood we make decisions through inertia.
- We have fun. Big decisions, complicated ones, with guts and glory start to energize us. We use them to explore the unknown and seek more information.
Big vs little decisions
We haven’t landed anywhere on this but it became clear that the decisions we’re talking about most with this project are those that involve more 2 people. Right now I’m seeing them as both (1) team decisions that cross over our individual crafts, ie should we take the brand in this direction? and (2) decisions that we want to make with other teams in the business, “could we improve the experience for customer with this tech change?”
/rant because why not: Most companies spend too little time on big decisions and too much time on little decisions. Business loves clarity and big decisions are best made by teams that can sit with complexity without getting overwhelmed.
What did we accomplish?
Now we have a clear goal of what we want to achieve and a clear scope of why we’re doing all this.
Project goal
A clear process for team decisions, both within our team and with other teams in the business
Why it matters
Decisions are key to our ability to move fast towards our goals
Scope of work
Identify where our ideal decision process doesn’t match with reality. Come up with ideas to test for getting it closer. Test. Come back. Share learnings. Refine. Test again.
A confession to finish
When I started writing this blog I didn’t really know what I got out of our first session. One reason I started writing was to push my point of view to become clearer so that others could read it. After 4 edits and 3 additional pairs of eyes, I think we’ve got there. Now on to the actual project!
*IOO = in our opinion
thanks for the editing love. Since you suggested a question to close this blog, here’s one: what’d you get out of this session?
