Decisions, Decisions: A Model for Making Quality Decisions & Managing Perception

If a Decision Tree falls in a forest…*

You make the call. It’s the right call. People resent you.
You make the call. It’s the right call. People appreciate you.
You make the call. It’s the wrong call. People support you.
You make the call. It’s the wrong call. Trust is strained.

It’s important (for me) to remember: the perception of a decision and the decision itself are far more intertwined than I assume.

When clients come to me asking how to make better decisions, my inquiry is: what defines a good decision?

What I’ve found over many years of helping founders and executives improve their decision-making is that, ultimately, decisions are relational challenges as well as logical ones. Decisions are the birth of a commitment that affects us. They act on our teams moving forward. They impact our trust in direction and in each other. They establish accountability to one another. And thus, becoming adept at making decisions “as a team” is an investment in lowering the cost of communication between individuals and groups.

Making a quality decision through a process no one respects can result in discord, the cost of communication going up, resentment, and negative belonging considerations.

Making a decision that is good enough but gets everyone rowing in the same direction is relatively effective by comparison.

When thinking about formalizing how you make decisions – remember this: the effectiveness of a decision can be conceptualized as the product of the quality of the conclusion and the acceptance by the team of that conclusion.

Effectiveness = Quality X Acceptance

If there is zero acceptance, the effectiveness is simply the product of zero.

We must think about decision making not as an academic and objective exercise in navigating the problem logically but as a social container to hold the inherent messiness of the perspectives, emotions, and relationships that exist in the team.

Knowing Which Decision-Making Framework To Use

There are many decision-making frameworks out there. Many of them implicitly speak to the way that acceptance is key. Some of them help people define what role they play in the decision. Others help codify the necessary ingredients for the commitment the decision creates. Many frameworks ask us to assess the capabilities and willingness of the team.

Some frameworks assume a lot of collaboration and consultation; others can be implemented with more autocratic approaches.

In the early-stage companies I work with, in the mission-driven orgs, in the non-profits I work with: alignment is taken for granted. The mission is why we are here! Of course, alignment is obvious. But if you pick a method for your decision-making that assumes alignment when there are reservations, you may surface tensions. If you don’t take into account how trust in the person making the decision affects others’ ability to commit, you will make it harder on yourself.

Decisions, broadly, are made with processes that range from consultative to autocratic. The more you involve others’ perspectives, the more consultative. The more you decide using your authority alone, the more autocratic.

How your organization, your team, and your company make decisions often emerges organically out of the cultural choices of who we empower, how they like to lead, and the pressures on the company and thus their leaders.

Many leaders I coach have a preference – when capacity allows, they lean towards their own authority or consulting a wider group. The lever to growth: understanding when your (or your org’s) preferred decision-making mode is going to be maladaptive.

Back in the mid 1900s, researchers Vroom and Yetton built a framework to help you. Through extensive deduction, they crafted a straightforward decision tree to help us understand how and when you might want to be autocratic vs consultative vs delegate. And it begins by asking questions about the problem and the team.

1. Does quality of the decision matter much here?
2. Do I already have what I need to decide well?
3. Is the problem well-structured?
4. Does execution depend on other people’s commitment?
5. If I just decide, would they commit anyway?
6. Do the people involved share the goal the decision serves?
7. Is disagreement about the answer likely amongst the team?

Answer these questions, then follow the flow chart. You will be guided to a method to make decisions that range from deciding yourself to giving that authority to others.

*I’m no philosopher. But the well-known philosophical question about whether or not a tree falling in the forest makes a noise if no one perceives that noise references George Berkeley’s musing on the importance of perception.