How to NOT Decide
This is the second post in a series on NOT deciding. The first post discussed a framework for determining when to decide and why it sometimes pays to wait. In this post we’ll discuss how to delay a decision without losing the context. In further posts, we’ll go deeper into the strategy of NOT deciding — why it’s difficult, what to watch out for, and how to talk to your teams about waiting.
If you find yourself facing an important (high-impact) decision for which there’s no going back (irreversible), the best strategy is to wait as long as you can before deciding. Delaying the decision maximizes your optionality and allows you to reduce uncertainty by collecting new information. The time to decide doesn’t come until a) there’s no more useful information to collect or b) you’re about to miss an important opportunity. At that point you’ll know you’ve done everything you can to make the best decision possible without incurring a loss.
When implementing this strategy, you’ll quickly find postponing a decision easier said than done. For one, you’ll need a process for executing on a “long lived” decision that doesn’t bog down everything else you’re doing. You‘ll want to focus on the decision when there is valuable work to be done on it, and put it away when there isn’t. You’ll also need to get everyone completely and quickly back up to speed when new information is available or when it’s finally time to decide.
Your computer does this well — if it sees a program is awaiting information (e.g.: returning data from a hard disk), it will “swap it out” and work on other tasks. “Swapping out” works because a computer can easily store the context of the program — where it left off and all the relevant data it was working with. When the information is ready, the original program context is “swapped in” and execution continues from where it left off.
You can use this as a basis for a decision-making process: work on the decision when there is information to digest, and if not, record the context and “swap out”. But how do we record the context? For many teams, the context would consist largely of face to face discussions in meetings. You might also have things like meeting notes, Slack threads, emails or documents. Even if you manage to store everything when you swap out, none of it is organized, and the process of swapping in means a painful search through reams of text to find relevant info. Any verbal discussion that wasn’t recorded is lost. Different team members will return to the table with different sets of context, depending on what they remember and what they were able to find.
The answer to this one is simple, and has so many other great benefits — do your decision-making in writing, organized around a decision record. A decision record is a document that describes the problem and lists the currently available options. It includes the relevant information and data, lists outstanding questions and the people responsible for clarifying them, and makes note of all people involved. If the decision record is kept up to date whenever new information is uncovered, you get swapping out for free — just close the tab! Swapping in is a simple matter of re-reading a single document.
To really get everyone up to speed during swapping in, you’ll also want to record the “why” behind each part of the decision record. This helps you avoid rehashing old arguments when you revisit the decision — the “didn’t we talk about this already?” phenomenon. The best way to do this is to avoid in-person meetings for decision making and keep the discussion in written form as part of the decision record. Any document collaboration tool (GitHub, Google Docs, Notion, Confluence etc.) can do this for you by storing conversation threads relevant to specific content in the document. You just need to make sure the conversation happens there, instead of verbally. To understand how a certain component of the decision record was agreed on, just look at version history, or pull up the discussion thread relevant to that content.
If you are disciplined in keeping the decision in written form, centred around the decision record, the context swap becomes simple — go read it. Everyone involved can get up to speed on the current state of the discussion, and has context to understand the why behind the current state. New information can be recorded and synthesized. If it’s time to decide, you can do so, otherwise, swap it back out again. In this way you can spend as much time as you need on high-impact, irreversible decisions without distracting from more urgent things, or wasting time revisiting the same argument over and over.
There’s another problem outside of process however: postponing a decision just doesn’t feel good. Part of this is conditioning, and part is human nature. In the next post in the series, we’ll discuss this effect, what to watch out for, and what you can do to get your team excited about NOT deciding.
