Decision Dominos

March 12, 2010
1 Comment

dominosTake a look around your desk right now.  How many decisions are hanging around waiting for you to make them?  Have you thought about the costs of NOT making them?    Slow decisions can have a domino effect in organisations – creating unnecessary urgency and prevent learning.

Let’s say that you have asked someone for a recommendation on changing the venue for your next conference.  She has put forward 2 alternatives and her recommendation and is now awaiting your decision.  It’s been 2 weeks.   Domino 1: The venue gets booked by someone else.  Domino 2: the rates start to go up.  Domino 3:  The event invitation is delayed and registrations suffer.

But the costs actually go deeper than that.  Domino 4:  People stop working on the conference and turn to other projects in the interim.  If you continue to wait to make a decision until the last minute – when it absolutely has to be made – it now has urgency.  Once you make your decision, everyone will have to stop what they are doing and start on the conference work again.

Tom DeMarco’s book ‘Slack’ quantifies the cost of switching between tasks as not only the mechanics of moving to a new task, but also:

Rework due to inopportune abort + loss of immersion time + loss of team binding effects = 15% penalty

In other words, each interruption comes at a cost.  By waiting until the last minute, you create both urgency and interruption for the people around you.

But I think there is another domino missing to DeMarco’s equation:  Learning.    decision cycle

Each decision you make is an output for which evaluation and learning are inputs to your organisation.  Accelerated decision making increases the outputs, which, in turn, increase the inputs*.  Things get moving and your organisation gets smarter faster.

So, how do you create a culture that accelerates decisions? 

  1. Be willing to experiment by making decisions even if you don’t have all of the answers
  2. Establish guiding principles  – Don’t punish people for making a ‘bad’ decision and don’t reward people for hard work that resulted from last-minute decisions
  3. Focus on communication and information flow that encourages evaluation and learning
  4. Spend more time talking about ‘what’ you are trying to achieve and less on ‘how’ you want it done . 
  5. Empower decisions to be made as close to the problem as possible – not just at the top. 

Now, take another look around your desk.  Are you creating a domino effect?  If there are decisions to be made – make them.    Even the wrong decision could be less costly than no decision at all.

 

* Webb, P. J. (2006). Inspirational Chaos: Executive Coaching and Tolerance of Complexity. In M. Cavanagh, A. M. Grant & T. Kemp (Eds.), Evidence-based Coaching. Theory, research and practice from the behavioural sciences. (Vol. 1, pp. 83-95). Bowen Hills: Australian Academic Press.

Filed under: Business
Tagged:

Comments

One Response to “Decision Dominos”

  1. Janet on July 15th, 2010 6:09 pm

    “By waiting until the last minute, you create both urgency and interruption for the people around you.”

    This applies not only to taking decisions but also taking actions when they are due!

Feel free to leave a comment...