(2023-12-29) Improving Strategic Decision Making In2024

Uncertainty Project: Improving strategic decision making in 2024. 3 Challenges for improving strategic decision making in 2024...

What does it mean to be a decisive company? It starts with recognizing decision making as an organizational capability that can be improved.

“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of ‘I’m not sure’.”: Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets

Challenge 1: Approaching decision making as an explicit practice

For many organizations, asking “How does your company make decisions?” is typically met with blank stares

Decisions have a [[lifecycle]. Where do they originate? How are they framed?

At the Uncertainty Project, we use the term ‘Decision Architecture’ to define the set of practices and principles organizations use to evaluate, make, and communicate decisions

The Challenge:

• Create an experience map of the current decision making process
• Identify pain points with the existing experience
• Publish an initial version of your ‘Decision Architecture’

Challenge 2: Clarifying decision rights

If there’s one consistent pain point we see, it’s murky decision authority.

During my time spent in product management at Atlassian, we used the DACI framework extensively across the company (driver, approver, contributor, informed) (cf RACI) (governance)

Arguably the most popular framework is Bain & Company’s RAPID Framework - most famously used by Coinbase, among others.

For those that have tried one or more of these frameworks, you may already know some of the challenges that arise - just to name a few:...

...Decisions surface as a document with biased framing - the decision has already been made and the documentation is clearly for theater

They tend to leave out dissenters or others who are downstream impacted

This year, we talked quite a bit about the importance of creating clear decision rights around strategic context (e.g. business units, products, solutions, etc…)

Challenge 3: Revisit the underlying foundation driving every day decision making

*Many years ago, I read Donella Meadow’s essay on ‘Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System’ - in particular, she ranks paradigm shifts and transcending paradigms as the most impactful levers of change.

She explains the paradox that paradigms are the most difficult and impactful levers, yet arguably the least expensive and quickest to change.*

In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.

We also talked about challenging these strong underlying models through building belief portfolios, mapping assumptions, and building a 360° view of your strategy.

The challenge: Document existing beliefs - not for the purpose of challenging them (yet), just to revisit them and understand how they came to be.

If you’re feeling spicy, run a belief challenging exercise - see how much these beliefs align with the views of leaders in the organization today and have a healthy conversation around any contradictory viewpoints.

For beliefs and assumptions that remain strong, think about setting tripwires by asking, what would have to be true to change our mind about this?