Decisions, Decisions, Decisions…

6 June 2008 on 4:06 am by Jarmal Richard | In strategy |

We make a lot of decisions everyday in business.Have you ever had to make the same decision, again, but on different occasions?

Or, have you ever made a decision that was contingent on someone else in your business making a decision?

If neither of these scenarios have been your experience, you are in the .0001% of the business world, and you can stop reading now.

For the rest of us, the reality of repeat decisions and contingent decisions permeate our day to day business existence.

So, you might ask - “Is everyone suffering in silence in an effort to make, and the keep track of decisions, locating decisions, prioritising decisions and cross-pollinating decisions within their companies and organisations?”

With product development cycles and product shelf-life shrinking, competition growing, supply chains diverging and customers becoming increasingly demanding (some of them even becoming your competitors), it is more important than ever to identify, understand and leverage the key, critical decisions that have been made (and need to be made) within your company or organisation.

Hands up if you have a filing cabinet and a computer hard drive?

Keep your hands up if everyone in your company or organisation has the same information repository architecture (ie. filing cabinet and computer hard drive).

Now, ask your self the following questions:

• What were the most critical strategic and operational decisions made in your organisation over the last 90 days?
• Are these decisions recorded in an accessible medium for employees and contractors to see, refer to and discuss?
• How were these decisions tied to the growth and profitability/KPIs (key performance indicators) of your company or organisation?
• How are the decisions you (and your fellow employees and contractors) make today facilitating or hindering these critical strategic and operational decisions?
• Tomorrow, when you come to work and begin make decisions or, or at least looking for contingent decisions while have your coffee, ask yourself:
  • Will each of your decisions start from brick one?
  • Will you have to ask someone for permission to gain access to their decision(s), so you can make decisions?
  • Will you give other people access to the decisions you make?

How easy will it be to recall the decision you are about to make in 2 days, 7 days, 90 days etc.?

If you find these questions frustrating, and you are uncertain of how to answer them, and you don’t know where this is all going, you are living in a dominating transaction processing work environment.

Processing transactions properly is important to the viability of any growing and emerging company, but, duplication and double handling are significant operational hurdles to any business, and lack of access to business intelligence and know-how can be catastrophic when competing in increasingly competitive, global markets that require a premium on accuracy, speed and service.

So what is the easiest, cost effective way of dealing with this quandary?

First, commit to doing less - do only the critical things (and make only the critical decisions) that move your company or organisation in a profitable direction. Do not add to the pile. See if you can eliminate the pile; or at least minimize it. For all non-critical decisions and procedures, identify them initially, and put them in a rolling 30 day checkpoint cycle and see if not making these decisions has either heightened risk in your business or come back to bite you; if neither has occurred within the 30 day period of not doing them, continue your commitment to not making these non-critical decisions until your next 30 day checkpoint review, and so on. The only non-critical decisions that should come out of these cycles are the ones that bite back or raise risk. If you find that a decision was defined incorrectly, and should have been considered a critical decision earlier on, redefine it and deal with it accordingly; again this decision should also only be reviewed every 30 days. The first step is to down tools and ask everyone to collectively defined “critical” vs. “non-critical” decisions, reach an actual decision and then progress from there.

Second, capture the right decisions (learn from and diminish the wrong decisions) and develop a central access point - this doesn’t mean you should relinquish decision making power to information fiefdoms and power brokers within your company or organization - far from it; what it means is you should allow all decision makers to make the critical decisions they are going to make (both in isolation and as project groups where required), but capture and filter decisions, and then centralise them into a DECISION MARKET which becomes a point of archiving your business’ know-how, and can be leveraged as a sounding board (ie. cross-pollinated across all staff) for future decisions.

Third, remodel job requirements and incentives for staff in order to facilitate:

• High quality decision making of critical decisions.

• Elimination of the inefficiencies associated with bad decisions and spending too much time on making non-critical decisions (looking at both individual and project team performance and decision making capability); and

• An absolute commitment across the business to sustaining a productive and accurate DECISION MARKET.

Fourth, re-align your existing infrastructure to deliver a DECISION MARKET for your business. If you have no infrastructure or the wrong infrastructure, get the right infrastructure quickly.

There is nothing worse than a Formula One pit crew without an intuitive, workable pit to live in!

The Formula One constructor’s championship is a testament to engineering and team work in getting through critical issues by quickly making good decisions and rebounding from bad decisions, against a competitive, aggressive field.

How decision fit is your business when compared to your competition?