Make Less Decisions

We all have to make too many decisions. At work. At home. It’s too much.

My wife occasionally trusts me to run to the grocery store where I have to sort through roughly 40,000 products in your average grocery store. I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s too much - a recipe for disaster.

But I have a framework to make my decisions, so off I go. Must be on the list. Must be a healthy option. Preferred to be organic. Easy.

But what if I didn’t have that framework? If I called her with a quick question about the brand of strawberries, then again when I got to the cereal isle - it wouldn’t end well. She would eventually not only become incredibly frustrated, but would have to go and make the decisions and purchases herself. But she has bigger things to manage (not just now that my second child is on the way, but in running our household on a regular basis). 

This framework frees her of having to make granular decisions. As the CEO of our household, she leverages this framework to push decision making to the edges - or lower in the company (me). 

It’s the same for my team. I give them a framework to make decisions, so I can run bigger initiatives. I simply cannot make all the decisions myself, I must allow others to do it. Not only is it that I cannot make all the decisions, I don’t want to.

But what happens if you don’t provide a framework and your team is sorting through the 40,000 products on their own? What happens if everyone in the company makes decisions without a proper framework to guide them?

• You’re going to have more headaches than you started with.
• You’re going to have employees who do not feel empowered. 
• You’re going to have to correct some mistakes (that are actually your fault).

You get it. It’s not good. 

• You want less headaches.
• You want your team members to be empowered. 
• You don’t want to do work twice. 

So you give them a framework to use as a guiding light. The professional version of a moral compass. 

This approach has allowed me to make significantly less decisions. And honestly - with my CSMs being the troops in the field, they often can make better decisions in battle than I can. And it’s not complicated. 

What is this framework?

It consists of three simple questions, that ideally can be answered in a binary way and will accelerate & de-risk a decision making process. 

• Is this good for the customer?
• Is this good for the company?
• Is this good for our culture? 

Why these questions? 

In my opinion, these are three ingredients of a successful business. I’m not saying they are the only ingredients. Rather the digestible ones that provide a healthy impact on the success of your business.  

Is this good for the customer?

I list this one first because the customer has to be first in everything that we do. This one is actually easy. We should not be doing things that aren’t good for the customer. Ideally this ‘good’ is both short and long term, it impacts a large amount of people within the customer’s company, and multiple customers. But let’s not complicate a cheese sandwich. When you’re hiring professional customer success people, if they can’t define ‘good’ for a customer, there are other challenges you face. 

Is this good for the company?

Slightly more complicated than the first, but still quite simple. Ideally ‘good’ in this case means that it’s a low cost effort (financial / time), it allows you to continue to scale, it impacts a large amount of employees, it impacts a number of departments, etc. But again - keep it simple. 

Is this good for the culture?

This is the least defined and since each culture varies, we can take a look at it in the most generic way. It also may not necessarily be impacted by each decision, but because we all know culture trumps strategy, it’s vital that you at least consider the cultural implications when making a decision. Does this improve the fabric of your company? Does it make you more customer centric? Does it bring your employees closer? Does it foster collaboration? 

What happens next? 

This is a simple recipe. It’s the easiest part.

• If the answer to all three is yes - pull the trigger and never look back. 
• If the answer to two is yes - consider tweaking your plan to where it fits for all three. But even if it doesn’t - it’s OK. You can’t always get all three. 
• If the answer to only one is yes - you’ve got some work to do. Zoom further out - or further in. How do you develop a plan that works for more?

As long as your team can back it up by answering those three questions to the best of their ability - it doesn’t matter if you agree with the decision that they made. They did the right thing. Would you do them differently? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they made the best decision they could with the information at hand and an understanding of how it impacts the three most important things to the business. 

In developing this - all I actually did was simplify and vocalize my thought process when I make decisions. You don’t have to use mine because you already have one. You already have the mental checklist that you go through. Write it down, simplify it, introduce it to your team and let them out into the wild.