Primer: What is Decision Driven Design?

Decision Design is how companies make highly informed and focused superstars out of employees. Decision Design translates to winning in the market. You only win the “battles” your “soldiers” can fight.?

Ultimately, a company’s value is just the sum of the decisions it makes and executes. Lack of attention to the decision-making process can thwart the best-designed business models and undermine performance in the organization that delivers them. Both big, one-off decisions and small, routine decisions cumulatively have a significant impact on the customer’s realization of your value proposition.

My premise is simple:

• Business processes create value.
• Every process should have an owner.?
• Every process should be continually measured.

Do Decisions Matter?

My philosophy has always been to organize the companies I lead around the decisions required to drive the Key Activities of our business model. These Key Activities are the tasks necessary to run the business and support the completion of the customer’s Job-to-be-done (JTBD). The Key Resources, on the other hand, are the team members who perform these tasks. By focusing on these key elements, we can make and execute key decisions better and faster than our competitors.

This excellent article from Sloan Management explains it well. Is Decision-Based Evidence Making Necessarily Bad?, Peter M. Tingling and Michael J. Brydon, MIT Sloan Management Review

When done right, your healthcare company’s Decisions get better.

• They are made faster.
• They are made better.
• They are made for the proper work (priorities).
• They are made by identified decision-makers.
• They are supported through belief, not mandate.

The Goals

The goals of the Decision-Driven Organization are to develop and implement a set of formal organizational arrangements that connect an organization's people, process, and technology to mission-critical decisions. It also shapes behavior by enabling people to do the right work through role delineation. And finally, it looks to develop talent among leaders to sustain the decision-driven model. Implemented correctly, these practices have repeatedly been shown to reduce time-to-market, improve partner satisfaction, spark innovation, and, most importantly, boost organizational morale.

I call this Operational Interconnectivity a key aspect of decision-driven design. It allows us to determine the organization's health, identify areas for improvement, and quickly create tactics for optimal performance. It also enables us to make changes quickly and be flexible enough to change as we learn. Most importantly, it makes everyone part of the solution, fostering a culture of collective decision-making and accountability.

The Results

The Process results in a Decision-Driven Organization. This approach will mechanize your decision-making process so employees can confidently perform the Key Activities of your business model. Of course, this requires periodic and thorough evaluation of the business model, its Key Activities, and the decisions, criteria, and evidence used to deliver it to the market.?

Your employees will have:

1. a clear understanding of their business model,
2. a clear understanding of the decisions they need to make, and
3. a clear understanding of how they will be held accountable for them.

The Method

As part of the modelH method , a key component of Decision Driven Design, I examine how to apply business model innovation to managing a new product, business line, or company. This approach boils down to identifying the right decisions and then designing the organizational authority so they can be made effectively. For instance, this method can be used in a MedTech company to identify the key decisions in the production process and design the organizational structure to ensure these decisions are made effectively and efficiently.?

As part of the modelH method , the Driven Design Process follows these six steps:

• Define the Decisions
• Define the Roles
• Define the Decision Criteria
• Define the Decision Evidence
• Define the Decision Analysis
• Review the Decision Outcomes

I will post a follow-up post on my method of installing decision-driven design into an organization. A few more excellent articles from Marcia W. Blenko, Michael Mankins, and Paul Rogers at Harvard Business Review on the subject are below:

• The Decision-Driven Organization
• Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance

To your health,?

Kevin Riley