The most important decision
How to speed up slow decision-making
How long does your company take to make decisions?
It’s common knowledge that decisions slow down as more people get involved. Everyone has experienced the frustrations of endless meetings without a decision or waiting around for someone to decide so you can move forward.
I was recently asked to speak about decision-making at a company’s leadership offsite and I wanted to show how groups, even large ones, can make better, faster decisions.
We set an ambitious goal: get more than seventy managers on a single zoom call to make an important decision in under 20 minutes.
I split them into small groups to propose potential decisions, then brought everyone back together to share the single biggest decision-making accelerator I’ve ever learned.
What happened next was amazing to watch…
The better you disagree, the faster you decide
We waste a lot of time pitching others on the merits of our decisions. Great teams don’t need to agree to decide, they only need to align.
Decisions slow down when we try to get everyone to agree—they also get worse.
Put people in groups and you’re likely to experience the Abilene Paradox—a quirk of human interaction resulting in teams making a collective decision that none of the individuals feel is best.
The trouble is that we don’t know how to disagree.
I don’t mean that philosophically, I mean literally. We launch into debates without knowing who is going to decide. Without a clear decision-maker, disagreements default to time-wasting consensus building.
Counterintuitively, better disagreement leads to faster (and better) decisions.
The accelerator I mentioned will help your team disagree: Before you debate any decision, first decide who decides.
This is the most important decision you can make if you want to improve your team’s decision-making.
Here’s how to put it to work anytime you’re involved in a decision:
Stop any initial debate about the decision itself.
Ask: “Who is making this decision?”
Decide who decides, then go back into debating the original decision.
A few minutes spent clarifying the decision-maker up front saves hours or days down the line.
Not so fast
This tactic is easier said than done.
In fact, it’s exactly where the team got trapped at the leadership offsite.
After they came up with a few viable options for their decision, I explained the importance of deciding who decides. Then I opened it up for them to make their final decision.
The first thing someone did was dive right into the weeds.
Before I could jump in, more than one of their colleagues called out that they should first decide who decides—we got this (I assume) they were thinking!
The very next thing they did was launch into the debate about who should decide—without clarifying that decision-maker.
I let the conversation meander for a few minutes and then asked “What are we missing?”
That’s when the lightbulb went off.
Everyone on the call saw how easy it was to fall into the trap of debating without a decision-maker.
They decided who should decide and minutes later made a final decision.
A large group had just made a very fast decision—and they were all aligned.
It’s your choice
When was the last time your team decided anything in under twenty minutes, let alone an important decision with every manager at your company involved?
Decide who decides before you debate any decision.
Use it or not.
That decision is yours to make!
Try it yourself: The next time you jump straight into a debate with your team, stop and ask “Who is making this decision?”
How fast is the decision made once the decision-maker is clear?
😂 P.S. A terrible joke, try not to laugh…
Apparently exercising helps with decision-making.
It's true! I went for a jog today and decided I'm never going again.