Practice makes perfect…

This week was all about decision making which was of particular interest to me as it is one of the reasons I started exploring self management. My organisation is effective and delivers well, but decision making has been kept at the top. This has created a parent/child environment where many decisions are pushed back up to the top, or made with limited contribution.

Decision making is a key tool to putting into practice self management, so I was looking forward to exploring the different approaches. But it came on a week which was particularly hectic for me and I felt that I wasn’t going to be able to give it the time and focus needed. Through the reading I understood the practices of consensus, advice process and generative decision making (GDM) but couldn’t quite get my head around how they would actually work.

Through the group work and watching Elena and Lisa’s demo of GDM, I soon realised that I had been over complicating it all. And actually what was needed was to just start practising. Through this course and in my role. There needs to be practice in looking at a decision and deciding whether it is ripe, deciding which approach would most suit the decision and then how you facilitate the process.

So this takes practice. But there also needs to be the support behind that so people feel confident and empowered to take part. This will of course grow the more collaborative decision making is used effectively. But I was struck by something that the guest this week, Vivek Menon, said — there needs to be the investment in soft skills. We need to let go of being the decision makers and team members need to step up and take decision accountability and ownership. Time and resource needs to be invested for this shift to happen and for people to adapt.

We just need to take the leap into it — but this week I learned that actually it is not so much a leap, just another step.