Making good and quick decisions

A good and quick decision allows you and the team to seize opportunities and prevent problems from dragging. A common assumption is that speed of decision comes at the cost of quality of the decision. It does not have to be! While it may seem prudent to gather all the possible information to make the best decision, it may come at the expense of speed of decision making - and that can have downstream impact on bottomline and relationships. There are different types of decisions that people make on a day-to-day basis at work and they differ in terms of scale, impact, risk, frequency. Understanding the characteristics of a specific decision to be made is key as you would need to apply different approaches to it, just as how different diseases require different medicine. Anyone can contribute to making a quick and good decision, including you.

Sometimes decisions are made as a team and others are made as an individual. To better understand how you or the team currently make decisions, you might want to reflect on:

What are some occasions where you felt that decisions were slow? What were the obstacles? What do you think would help remove those obstacles?
What are some occasions where you felt decisions were fast? Were the outcomes of the decision positive or negative? How did the pace of the decision affect the outcome, and what can you learn about yourself or the team in terms of the decision making process?
Was there a clear decision maker? If not, what are some reasons that might contribute to not having a decision maker? Will you be able to point out that a clear decision maker is needed if similar circumstances are to arise in the future?

Identify the frequency, risk level, reversibility and impact of the decision.
Ensure that there is a decision marker and that everyone who is involved knows who the decision maker is.
Convey to the team or the decision maker the simple framework below on how to make good and fast decisions based on the type of decision:
1. Big-bet decisions (infrequent, high risk, large impact) which can be enhanced by facilitating productive debate
2. Cross cutting decisions (frequent, high risk) which can be enhanced by defining a decision process
3. Delegated decisions (frequent, low risk) which can be enhanced by empowering others

Making good and quick decisions

As mentioned earlier, different types of decisions require different approaches to the decision making process

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