Want to unleash your people? Then change how you make decisions

This article is a summary of our webinar:

Want to Empower and Unleash Your People? - Then Change How You Make Decisions by Andrea Darabos, Business agility coach at Lean Advantage (UK) delivered in November 2022. You can watch the full-length talk here .

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Why does decision-making matter?

On the personal level, it matters because how we make decisions in organisations today can be the key differentiating factor regarding our ability to attract top talent (or not). Talented people want to work in a way where they can deliver value to customers daily and are impatient to get fast (if not, instant) feedback. This new generation of entrepreneurial creatives want to experience tangible progress towards meaningful impact through their work, daily. I know, because I am one of them.

Moreover, on an organisational scale, decision-making effectiveness has a direct influence on a company’s present and future performance i.e. their market valuation. See Bain and Company’s 10-year research study with over 1000 companies found a correlation with 95% confidence between decision-making effectiveness in an organisation and the organisation’s business performance. They concluded that leaders who prioritise the pace of innovation make it easy for their people to make fast decisions and deliver value fast as a result. This type of think-make-see culture attracts the type of talent who wants to work on great products and see the difference their products make in the world in a relatively short timespan.

Why do we all crave more participatory, more transparent and more context-rich decision-making?

If we go back to human motivations theory, especially Daniel Pink’s empirical research - or the simpler, thinner book Drive he wrote on this topic -, we see that we all have 3 intrinsic (inner) motives: a need for Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

Autonomy:

We all crave a simpler, faster way to make decisions in organisations today. There is too much bureaucracy, approvals and documentation which slows down progress and limits creativity. When we let people make decisions without the need to check each and every step with their supervisors, we help them experience a sense of freedom and a sense of getting things done. To create simplicity and autonomy around decision-making, leaders can pre-approve employees to make frequently occurring decisions within pre-agreed guidelines or values.

Mastery:

By making the entire decision-making transparent and documented - sharing the context (the drive for decision, the intended outcome and assumptions around it), the proposed way forward and the comments/feedback/objections - we create a fertile ground for learning. When we also debrief the outcome of our agreed actions, the results and lessons learned from experiments - then we quadruple learning opportunities. I often encourage product teams to use simple canvases or tools like Jeff Gothelf’s Hypothesis canvas or the Strategyzer team’s Business Validation tools for this purpose. If you would like to create something simpler, I encourage you and your colleagues to take the intent of these and create your own :)

Purpose:

We often find ourselves in the monotony of “doing”, only to look up and feeling very unsure, why we are doing the things we do at all. Asking why and tapping into storytelling are great ways to create context around decisions - why a decision is important, what is the desired future we want to move towards, and why these possibilities matter to us? Using drawing, co-creative imagination, collaborative painting are techniques to tap into the complex, emotional, deeper parts of our consciousness and create a compelling future. To document all this around your decisions, try the Business model inc. visioning template , for example.

So we want to improve our decision making. Where do we start?

In my talk, we discussed the need to look at your organisation with a lens of value-creation for your customers. As if, you would walk back from the moment of “customer delight”, when you deliver your peak customer value, backwards towards how the whole experience is created throughout your organization. As you walk this path, be mindful of documenting it including the decisions your colleagues need to make along the way to bring ideas to life, to value. These are then the handful of decisions you need to prioritize. What infrastructure, context, data/tooling can you put in place so your staff can make these decisions easily and fast with relative high quality, in the context of the desired quality of the customer experience. To read more about the value of focusing on value delivery, visit the sociocracy 3.0 principles and the s3.0 community practising these principles. You will also find more information around organising for ease of decision making in the same s3.0 community.

What are case studies of organisations - not small, but large ones-, which figured out how to unleash people and create masses of value through decision-making?

In the seminar, we discussed a few examples. Buurtzorg, a Dutch community nursing organisation with 16,000 employees figured out how to de-centralise decision-making to semi-autonomous locally operating teams. The head office merely consists of 50 employees providing support services and coaching, mentoring to the customer-focused teams. You can explore more about their business model here and either visit the company in person or read some more about their organising principles here .

Another globally recognised organisation I invite you to explore is Handelsbanken. The bank truly trusts that their branch based employees are closest to what their customers need and are therefore most equipped to make the best decisions how to serve them. Instead of pushing products to customers, they focus on servicing the emergent, real customer needs. The CEO calls this the trust-based leadership model and describes the operating model via 7 clear values .

A hospitality case study we discussed in the talk is a wonderful provider of corporate retreat venues and experiences in rural locations across Central-Europe: Chateauform. Group chairman Daniel Abittan gives free reign to employees to make their own decisions on how to satisfy their clients - whatever it costs, without the need to ask for permission from anyone in the group. This is another way of saying: I trust you will make the best decisions based on what you know and the context you have available to you. The company ensures that their people are tuned into the values, purpose and client-centred skills needed to provide stellar client experiences via their in-house Chateauform Talent incubator programme .

Bringing all these inspirational stories together and back to our reality, how can we practically get started?

To get started, identify a handful of decisions on a client-facing service or product experience, which you would like to decentralise. I invite you to download and list these decisions on the management 3.0 Delegation board . Invite the people who are interested in taking a bigger responsibility and increase their participation in these decisions to be part of this conversation. Shift power to make decisions from the current decision-takers to a more distributed, participative model. If you need help getting started, or would like a neutral facilitator - we have helped colleagues at Google, Amazon and many other companies do this - so feel free to reach out to our Lean Advantage team !

How can we be smart(er) about the way we form agreements?

There are multiple ways to form agreements though consensus is typically the most commonly used approach. Consensus aims to achieve full support by every key decision-maker and stakeholder behind a proposal. The problem with consensus-based decision-making is that (1) it is very slow to reach agreement this way and (2) that it tends to generate groupthink as consensus focuses too early on in the decision-making process on harmony among all stakeholders. To improve your decision-making quality and speed, therefore, I suggest that you explore other decision-making processes:

• Majority vote

A fast decision-making process which can work well with simple or low risk decisions. Or roll a dice!

• Advice process

Any person can decide as long as they seek (and consider) advice from experts on the selected decision’s topic. The benefit is that for each decision, only a small number of people are consulted - those impacted by the decision and those with the expertise to advise. You can read about the steps of the advice process or watch a video on Enspiral’s blog here.

• Consent process

For speedy decision-making on relatively complex topics. Go ahead if the proposal is safe enough to try. The process works well to eliminate groupthink bias as it encourages everyone to brainstorm and raise risks and objections against the proposed way forward. Objections are usually resolved by iterating on the proposal and if no material objections remain, the decision is taken. Read about the consent process on the sociocracy 3.0 blog.

Many of these practices you shared are quite complex to learn and take a while to embed into how we operate. Do you have something simpler in store for us?

Of course! I am glad you asked for this! :) A quite surprising aspect of decision-making is that it’s quality depends largely on how we orchestrate participation in our day-to-day interactions. Improve our interactions and communications quality, will result in improved quality of decisions. Very practically speaking, we need to each become aware, how much airspace we are taking on meetings, in conversations - and balance it out. David L. Marquet, the ex-US. Navy-captain and author of the book: Leadership is language - developed a tool, that can diagnose this called the Team language coefficient .?

After each of us become aware of this, we can explore facilitating our own conversations and interactions. Liberating structures is a great resource to help us with this. Developed originally by ex-executive Henri Lipmanowitz and Keith McCandless, liberating structures are 33 micro-patterns for interactions that liberate everyone in a group to participate and to contribute their unique perspective to a discussion. To improve the quality of our decision-making, therefore, using Liberating structures will increase the quality of participation and contribution from every single individual in a group.

A specific aspect of facilitating participation is how we make participation voluntary and at the same time attractive. Using the same elements as in game design, we can issue playful invitations that create an engaging, playful, curious atmosphere at work and invite voluntary, opt-in participation in decision-making processes. Daniel Mezick and Mark Sheffield summarise this key leadership skill in their book Inviting leadership .

In summary

In order to shift our organisations towards a place for creation, collaboration and performance, we need to have a thorough look at how we make decisions. The more people are invited to participate in or to make decisions, the more likely we are going to tap into the diverse collective intelligence that already exists in our organisation. A larger number of people making decisions means more brains thinking about our vision, strategy and business execution. By increasing the diversity and the number of decision-makers we can achieve multiple wins: higher engagement in the work, reduced impact of cognitive biases, improved speed of delivery and higher likelihood of customer delight. I suggest it’s time we get started.

Andrea Darabos is the Founder of UK based business agility consultancy, Lean Advantage. She and her team partners with global FTSE500 organisations to unleash people for innovation and for rapid continuous product/service delivery at scale. You can watch her full-length talk on Decision-making here .