Quick Start: Team Decision Making
It's all too easy for a team to delay a decision—the right people aren't available, or there's not enough information—and as a result, projects get stuck. Ask yourself the following questions to make decisions faster as a team:
- What is the proposal on the table, and what are the alternatives? It might sound elementary, but teams often forego making a decision because the decision hasn't been framed in concrete terms. Even before you schedule time to decide, be sure to align on what needs to be decided and the alternatives before you.
- Who will make this decision? Is this a decision by committee, or will one person make the call? Nothing is more frustrating than thinking an issue has been decided, only to have the decision reversed later. Clarify everyone's roles upfront.
- What do we do after the decision is made? Ok, you've made a decision—but does each member of your team understand their role in executing on that decision? Be sure to plot out critical next steps during the decision making process.
- How will we look back and assess the impact of our decision? Time is the only infallible judge of a decision, so be sure to set critical milestones in your process that will force you to look back and evaluate the benefits and costs of your decision.
There are lots of ways to decide how to make a decision; we've included some of our favorite methods below.
Guides
- Use a Consent-Based Decision Making Model to Act Faster: How to adopt a policy in which "no one says no" for decisions to move forward.
- Use "Even Over" Statements to Distill a Strategy into Simple Rules of Thumb: Develop an easy heuristic to help your team decide what to do.
- How to Stop Indecisions from Hijacking Your Meetings: Make your meetings more productive with this simple process.
- How to Delegate Decision Making: Make sure you're empowering your team to make decisions without your input.
Case Studies
- How Jeff Bezos Frames Decisions for Speed and Inventiveness: The two types of decisions, and how they affect organizations.
- Use Square's Decision Making Model to Move Forward as a Team: The SPADE model keeps people informed while projects move forward.
- How Domino's Pizza Forced Itself to Change Using Island Warfare: A decision that isn't a decision at all.
- Spanx Speeds Up the Decision Making Process by Voting: A quick vote can help the team determine where everyone stands on an issue.
