3 steps to better, faster, flatter decision making
Our Cocktails and Culture evenings in London gather the bright and bold leading progressive businesses to share and lean together, while sipping a negroni or two. Its one of the ways we live our “learn together” value — bringing our clients and community together to share experiences of what it means to grow a 21st century adult organisation.
In our latest session we enjoyed fabulous views over the city from the rooftop bar at Hotel Indigo and explored how we can create the conditions for better. faster, flatter decision making in our organisations.
Many of us creating more collaborative cultures are enjoying open, effective decision making where responsibility and trust are powering the organisations we lead. And many of us would like to see it happen more often, more reliably and particularly when the business needs to respond at pace.
What’s getting in the way?
Our discussion surfaced the ‘blockers’ we experience, and we questioned whether they were “structural” (existing in how we organise ourselves) or “behavioural” (down to our attitudes, mindsets or how we show up). The distinction is not always clear but we were keen to explore whether the shifts we need to make are siting in either of the two areas.
Structural — Lack of clarity
Lack of clarity emerged as the overriding structural blocker. When there’s a lack of clarity in the organisational vision, roles and responsibilities are undefined, or there’s no clear decision-making framework, people don’t feel confident to step-in and make quality decisions quickly. We all agreed that everyone being super clear about the parameters helps us enjoy the autonomy of more participatory decision making.
Behavioural — Fear
Fear surfaced as the primary behavioural blocker — fear of getting it wrong — we’re worried that we’ll get it wrong and also that the other people we’ve tasked with making the decision will get it wrong! Fear is also holding us back from being clear about what we really want or need to happen — and it’s clear that being able to connect to that need and communicate it articulately, sits at the heart of quality decision making.
What can we do differently?
Opportunities to practice decision making
Learning the principles of good decision making felt like something we all wanted to explore more, talking with our teams about the distinct phases or components that constitute quality decision making and building a shared understanding of the ‘optimum’ process. We liked the idea of creating opportunities in our organisations where we could practice decision making at pace, hot-housing to build our collective muscle and use the experience to build a felt, embodied sense of what it’s like when it works well that we could take out and replicate in the live business.
At Within we build this in to our work with clients as creative exercises that help them to try out new behaviours and decision making in a safe space. This is a technique that leaders could use at any time — getting their teams out of the “doing” of daily execution to trial new ways of making decisions.
Learn how to say what is most important
We all agreed that we can get better at connecting to and articulating what’s most important to us. Knowing it’s so key to quality decision making, and that we need to be able to do it quickly when things move at pace, how can we support each other to develop this core skill? Building mini peer-coaching conversations into the decision making process help us connect to what really matters to us and what we’d like to see happen — this has been an invaluable practice for us at Within. And tools like Loomio invite us to respond to decisions from our individual perspective first, before we engage in any group evaluation, again helping us build the capacity to connect to what we think is most important. We’d love to hear what else is working for you?
Celebrate bravery
Universal applause for organisations truly celebrating bravery. This, we agreed, is the most powerful way to unlock the ‘fear’ block. We know we learn from our mistakes and we see different practices helping teams unpack what went wrong and what we learn for next time. Somehow celebrating bravery feels energetically different. It’s shining a light on the courage it takes to step-in and try something, to advocate for what you believe in, to deeply connect with what matters to you and take action. That takes real courage and potentially more so when the system is powered by trust and self-responsibility.
What next?
Creating the conditions for better, faster, flatter decision making is an ongoing practice for all of us. And we know that leaders model the behaviours that invite others to step-in and participate. So leaders have an opportunity to share their vulnerability, bring empathy and patience and celebrate courage and conviction.
We’ll be sharing stories about these more human qualities of leadership and how they’re helping leaders around the world grow successful 21st century businesses when we meet again at the end of November at our next Cocktails & Culture event in London, and at the fabulous Meaning Conference in Brighton on the 15th November.
If you’ve got a story you’d like to share, do get in touch, and come along to our events and meet more of the bright and bold over a cocktail or two.
