Making Decisions

Another day when articles come together.

Jeffrey Philips has an interesting article on decision making.

Church of the Customer has an interesting article on organisations that treat remote operations as ‘dumb terminals’.

Both of these articles focus on the current organisational cultures and constructs that make the process of decision making very difficult.

Jeffrey highlights four areas which compound the problems, four areas that I have seen in many organisations:

• Who has to be involved in the decision?
• How will we justify the decision?
• Does the decision align with corporate and strategic objectives?
• What happens if things don’t go so well?

Anyone who has worked in a large organisation will know that the answer to each of those questions has its own peculiar difficulties.

In many matrix organisations it seems that the answer to the ‘who’ question is ‘everyone’. Everyone wants a finger in the pie, everyone wants to contribute (and take away) and no-one is in a position to decide. It is this first problem that makes all other problems insurmountable.

The Church of the Customer article highlights decision making as an issue too. In their case the issue is about autonomy at the right level. Again ‘who has to be involved in the decision?’.

As organisations become more ‘virtual’ I can only see this issue getting worse. It’s bad enough when the question of who needs to be involved includes a broad spectrum of your own organisation; when you extend this out to another organisation then it just gets worse.

The best place I have ever worked is within a small office where we had a small team that was almost totally autonomous and was well focussed on a small set of priorities. We made decision quickly and we galloped our way through our priorities. Organisations need to realise this and focus on building those small-well focussed-autonomous teams if they don’t want to become a talking-shop which never makes any decisions.

Perhaps virtual organisations will be the answer to the problem eventually. Many people will be much happier when they don’t have to make any decisions themselves and give someone else the problem .