How to speed up your group decisions
How to speed up your group decisions
A look at why group decisions are so time consuming, the role of decision maps and three ideas for speeding them up.
Hello everyone 👋
I’m back from a fantastic week in Mexico with a newsletter edition on group decision-making. Group decisions are some of the most time consuming activities organizations are forced to undertake and there are a plethora of ways of improving the process used to make them.
I. A faster group decision making process
A year ago, I started asking organizations about their Decision Speed, which is how long it takes them to make their most important decisions. For some, the answer wasn’t pretty. They knew that they were taking too long and this was hurting their organization.
Decision Speed became even more relevant when it became clear that remote work was here to stay. For all the benefits of remote and hybrid schedules, there is one clear downside. It takes longer to decide.
The reasons for the slowness stem from having to coordinate virtual meetings or wait for people to be back in the office. Decisions that took a week might now take two weeks.
Faster decisions have two huge benefits. They allow you to capitalize on opportunities and deal with uncertainty.
Opportunities are all around you. It could be a new technology, a change in consumer behavior, a macro economic condition or something else. The challenge is not spotting these trends—pick up a newspaper and you’ll see them—but acting rapidly enough. The larger the organization, the tougher it will be to mobilize resources.
Uncertainty has been the uninvited third wheel in your professional relationships. I spoke before on how it is not possible to predict the future beyond a short time frame. Instead, organizations need to make rapid small bets i.e. faster decisions.
Before we can dive into the optimizations, we first need a map of our decision-making process.
II. Give me a decision map and I can move the world
When I run workshops for organizations on decision-making, I almost always get leaders to map out their team’s decision-making process. Most have never done this kind of exercise and are surprised at how many steps are involved.
Here are two examples from a recent workshop.
Ignore my world class calligraphy quality handwriting.
These two individuals outline the process they follow for one type of decision, typically a decision that is time consuming or critical.
Once we have the process on paper, we can play with it. Some things jump at them the moment they see their process “on paper.”
We may notice that they repeat steps multiple times or that one step is actually out of sequence and would be better suited earlier in the process.
These are highly capable leaders who get a lot done but have likely never taken the opportunity to analyze if their decision-making process is the most effective.
Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” I would riff on this and say that if you give a decision map (like the ones in the screenshot), I can help leaders move organizations.
Let’s jump into the most common patterns I see when it comes to group decisions.
III. Optimizing the redundancies of group decisions
After seeing plenty of these decision maps, three patterns have stood out to me.
First, you need a way to reduce the number of stakeholders. The concept of getting buy-in to decisions has clearly resonated with people and many teams now try to involve anyone and everyone in a decision.
Many decision maps start with the assumption that you will need to identify multiple stakeholders or schedule a meeting with all the stakeholders and so forth. They assume that you will need to corral a small army of individuals before making a decision.
The reality may be quite different. Among stakeholders, there’s always VIP individuals who have a bigger influence than others. You can find these VIPs, get them on board and then use their support to convince anyone else. In some cases, the approval of a single VIP may be all that is needed.
Second, notice the failure points. I had one leader who was forced to repeat steps because his CEO came in late, think step five or six, into the process. The obvious solution was to consult the CEO earlier, step one or two.
Failure points are not meant to be solved. Instead, you need to find ways to prevent them altogether. I have heard people assume that failure is inevitable and just the way things are done. That is categorically not true in all situations.
Third, reject any unnecessary work. One leader shared how her team was trying to deal with a legal issue, which was consuming a large amount of time. After digging into the details, it became clear that this issue was not related to the mission of the organization.
Unnecessary decisions arise all the time but you need a way to determine if they are relevant to your organization. We have such a drive to solve problems that we may default to resolving issues when we should just ignore them.
In short, speeding up group decisions comes down to involving fewer individuals, preventing failure points and rejecting unnecessary work. These may seem obvious but I challenge you to analyze the last five group decisions you made to see how many fell prey to these pitfalls.
Enjoy the rest of the week and make sure you’re not spending too much time on group decisions!
Ruben
P.S. If you’re interested in getting your team to map out their decisions and find improvements, then check out my workshops. These are custom designed for each organization and can be run in half-day or full-day increments.
These workshops are fantastic for retooling how your team make decisions. Some of the benefits include:
Increase the Decision Speed within your organizations
Challenge long standing assumptions on how decisions get made
Decrease the labour intensity of your team
Deal with challenges around remote work and hybrid schedules
Increase the diversity of ideas and opinions from your team
Learn more and get in touch here: https://www.rubenugarte.com/workshops