Who’s who? Roles in decision-making
One of the first steps in decision-making is to figure out who does what. You might think it is obvious that there would be a well-defined decision-maker. But many situations lack that clarity.
Imagine a typical inter-departmental corporate or government meeting. You might have often spent hours in such meetings without a conclusion or an action plan!
We will take a look at some of the essential roles that need to played in a good decision-making process. The same person could play all the roles (like when you choose what laptop to buy) or there could be multiple people in each role depending on the complexity of the decision.
The decision-maker
If you are making personal decisions impacting your family you might share this role with your partner. Managers are typically the decision-makers for their teams. This is a bit less clear in settings where there are many peers and no clear leader. An organization’s culture has to ensure that such meetings conclude with decisions and alignment.
For example, the finance department may share information on how to finance of a project and the execution team might say what are the pieces needed to execute but someone (usually the business or P&L owner) needs to own the decision of whether to go ahead or not.
You can have multiple people in this role. The board of directors of a company are basically a group of people combining to perform a decision-making role. The voters of a country together decide who governs.
A decision-making process or meeting with no clear decision-maker is as good as flushing money down the drain.
So let us say there is an identified decision-maker. Now if you are a part of a decision-making process, what other roles can you play?
The recommender
The recommender shines a light on what they think the decision-maker should know before making a decision. This role involves the exploration of options, information and prior experiences.
It could be helping your neighbour pick a WiFi router or help your bosses understand how a new technology could improve productivity. It could be your daughter explaining what kind of table she wants for her study.
The things a recommender can do can range from:
- presenting a set of options and their pros and cons
- gathering input from other stakeholders or on other options
- discussing the impact of possible outcomes
The recommender may be either directly impacted by the decision or can be someone who has participated in or made such decisions before.
In the corporate world, strategy teams, analysts, consultants and subject matter experts play this role to help business owners make decisions. In economic policy, the recommenders could be played by sociologists, economists, finance professionals and others.
The customer
The customer is anyone who is impacted by the decision. Any decision-making process ideally should consult those positively or negatively impacted by it. For example, the public is the customer for Government policies and public consultation is a process that can aid policy-making. Your developers are the customer for a new internal productivity tool. You are the customer for the laptop you want to buy.
For example, making product decisions without talking to potential users or customers mostly ends in failure.
One thing to be careful of with the customer, is to make sure that you focus discussions with them on the problem to be solved and the value or impact of the changes. The particulars of how the problem should be solved is better handled by the implementer.
The implementer
Once a decision is taken there could be a set of people involved in implementing it. For example, a construction company might build a metro system based on a policy decision. Your IT team might implement a decision to revamp your technology infrastructure.
It is important to get the perspective of those who will need to implement your decision.
While there are always surprises during implementation, involving the people playing this role beforehand brings at least two benefits:
- Know as much as you can about how the implementation would look like
- Make the implementer feel a part of the decision. This feeling of ownership will motivate them and likely increase the probability of success
Why should you clarify roles?
If you are in a meeting or part of a process but are not playing any of these roles, you are wasting your time! Cut your losses and get out.
If you are playing one of these roles but it is not clear who are playing the other roles, bring it up. Fix that problem before any more time is wasted.
You may want a bigger role. Claim that role by explaining how you can add value.
Multiple people playing the same role
If you are all:
- Decision-makers: Understand all the information and recommendations, then take a vote. Ask the outliers why they voted differently. Take another vote if required and then proceed.
- Recommenders: The decision-makers could speak to one recommender at a time in private or ask them to submit their recommendation before an open discussion with everyone. This lets the decision-makers get independent input without one recommender affecting another’s recommendation too much. However, this does need more time than just going around the table. Structuring this process will probably be a topic on its own!
A common situation is a “cabinet” decision where the entire cabinet is playing decision-maker and one or more of them are recommenders.
There is a first among equals (like a President, Prime Minister or CEO) and others (ministers or the management team). Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, has mentioned that he asks his management team to score proposals on piece of paper on a scale of -10 to +10 first and then discuss the outlier scores before agreeing on a course of action.
Same person playing multiple roles
This can get tricky. For example, an iPhone Pro could burn a hole through your pocket but the customer in you would really like to get their hands on it!
You can try to separate the different roles in time.
For example, you may check out the product and reviews until Friday (wear the customer hat); craft a couple of options on Saturday (the recommender hat) and then play the decision-maker on Sunday. The options here might be get the iPhone now or wait a year and get the Pro.
You could also bring others into the decision.
Find someone who has a similar use case and talk to them about what they did and how it turned out. But do not outsource the decision-maker role. That is not fair on others and they may not fully understand your situation anyway.
The worst you could do is know nothing about the products, walk into the store and let the salesperson decide for you!
Own your decision and live with the consequences. Or better, learn from it.
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