Achieving Empowerment in a Non Trusting Work Environment (Going back to being Organic Organizations – Part 02)

As understood in the previous article, “Trust” is mainly depending on the “predictability of behavior” on both the superiors and subordinates.

To understand this, let’s examine a typical point of view on the relationship between a “Supervisor” and a “Subordinate”.

Obvious solutions given to avoid these situations focuses on few key areas;

• Focus on “selecting” the right candidates for the jobs with matching personalities and attitudes
• Train, coach and mentor the employees on decision making
• Develop an organizational culture based on “Trust”

Yet there is one common problem in this approach. It is that the approach is mostly qualitative. Qualitative nature of the above solution makes it very difficult to implement while takes a long time to produce meaningful results. In a modern business context where the “Millennials” dominate the junior management positions, long-term commitments are something very hard to find. Hence achieving “organic” organizations becomes impossible.

But if we can find a mechanism to enable decision-making takes place at the lowest possible point through probably using mechanical and procedural techniques until the organization's restructuring and refocusing in the long run, we can have the best of both worlds.

So, how we can achieve sustainable decentralization and instant decision making in the short run;

The process we propose is called the ICSP Approach to decision making (See Figure Below). This aims at the continuous progress of organization towards “organic” organizations.

Step 01: Identification

The first step of this process is to formally identify the decision making situations a company, a job or a department may face during a period of time. This is mainly important because many organizations have executives with great experience on different decision making situations in their head, but nothing in the documentation. As a result of this;

• Organizations has to depend on individuals to make decisions which are a vulnerability for any organization
• Passing the decision making responsibilities to others (Newcomers, replacements, etc.) becomes really difficult and uncontrollable

Given the advancement of technology, organizations can easily have a repository of decision situations and possible solutions an individual can take. This encourages organizations to transfer the know-how from individual brains to the organization.

Step 02: Classification

Any decision-making situation identified should be then classified. We recommend classifying decision-making situations based on two criteria.

• Possibility of Occurrence: How likely the considering decision-making situation to be experienced in a given time period
• Degree of Damage: How much damage it can cause if a wrong decision being made

You can rate the above for each decision-making situation on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Extremely least possible to occur / Extremely minor damage and 10 being Extremely high possibility to occur / Extremely high damage.

Based on the score they get (Minimum 1 and Maximum 100) you can classify them into four Classes (Groups).

Step 03: Standardization

As explained above, there are four classes of decision making situations to be found in any organization. Once you have classified them, the next step is to develop responses to each decision-making situation and develop a Standard Response Procedure Manual (SRPM) to each decision-making situation.

But the responses you may develop should be suitable for each class of decision-making situations.

Guide Lines to develop responses for Class 01 situations

If an organization has to take life threatening decisions every day, every hour; then there is a problem in the whole business model. For an example, if every day one or many of your major clients comes and fights with you regarding a problem, you have to have a serious look at your business model and the value chain.

Therefore, for any decision-making situation falling into this “class”, the response should be to eliminate the situation or shift it to “class 02 or 03” by improving the business model in the long run.

• You can shift a decision-making situation in this class to “class 02” by system improvements. Implementing quality assurance systems such as Six Sigma can be used.
• You can shift a decision-making situation in this class to “class 03” by Remodeling the business model. Ensure the business model will not be vulnerable to the given decision-making situation by reprioritizing and remodeling.

Guide Lines to develop responses for Class 02 situations

Class 02 decisions will be difficult to transfer to lower decision making levels with less experience and less exposure to decision making. Therefore, they can be kept within the top level managers and seasoned decision makers of the organization.

Yet, the percentage of class two decisions existing within an organization should be 20% - 30%. Otherwise, the top management will be too busy involved in solving such decisions than working on future improvements.

Guide Lines to develop responses for Class 03 situations

These are the ideal decision-making situations to be passed to the lower levels. Yet, just asking them to take the decisions will be a failure given the untrustworthy context existing in the situations. Hence Managers need to sit together with the subordinates to develop “Factor Rating Tables (FRT)” for each decision-making situation.

Factor Rating Tables will standardize the decision-making scenarios. By doing that, companies can allow even inexperienced individuals to take correct decisions most of the time.

Guide Lines to develop responses for Class 04 situations

Better to ignore these scenarios altogether. Benefits you gain may not worth the effort you have to put in to develop a response to these scenarios.

Summary of the above responses is given in the table below.

Step 04: Progression

Obviously, organizations have to go through changes all the time. They have to adapt to all the changes takes place in both the internal and external environment. Thus creating a single SRPM and believing that it will solve the problems forever becomes a myth.

Therefore, organizations have to create a dynamic process to create a progressing SRP. By doing that, they will have a continuously updating SRP which provides the optimum decision-making framework to any situation.

This can be done by;

• Reviewing the SRP periodically by a cross-functional team and do the updates. Their periodic meetings can be either time based (quarterly, annually, etc.) or incident base (After every strategic meeting, etc.).
• Create a dynamic system of “Monitoring – Analyzing – Recording” to instantly monitor any new decision-making situation trends and update the system following the three steps. This approach can be more dynamic and responsive, yet resource consuming.

Finally, I assume may be waiting to ask me whether SRPM is practically possible in a real life decision-making scenario. For that I have only one answer;

Ask any Pilot who has flown a commercial airplane, how they take decisions in a critical situation like an engine failure while they fly.