Decision Making Principles and Practices

Introduction

The better resource I use on this topic is the book 27 Decision making principles and practices from Jimmy Janlen

I strongly invite you to buy the book on leanpub. In this post I will just give some pieces of it.

Self-organized teams need to master the skill of having efficient and constructive discussions that engage and involve everyone.

Teams must learn :

How to reach strong inclusive agreements
- With clear decisions and next steps
How to make decisions fast

What is the risk of failing in decision making ?

Often teams struggle in this area and get stuck in decision paralysis. It doesn’t serve anyone and can really block from being competitive.

Failing to agree as a team, resorting to “the boss decides”.

It will undermine commitment, create conflicts and grudges, and quickly compromising the team.

Always have a facilitator

Always ensure you have a facilitator for each and every meeting

If you don't have a dedicated facilitator in your team you can :

Elect one at the beginning of the meeting
Rotate the facilitator responsibility (according to you)
- For each meeting
- Per week
- Per sprint
- Whatever

How to propose ?

Before deciding anything we need to work on how to propose something. It's the first step before getting ready for decision taking.

Present, Discuss, Improve

Allow the person with an idea to present the proposal
If a proposal has emerged through a discussion
- Nominate a team member to summarize and present the proposal as he/she has understood it
- This person becomes the temporary facilitator

During the presentation everyone takes notes.

Once the presentation is done :

Clarifying questions are asked
Ideas for improving the proposal are discussed
Concerns are raised, and if possible used to further improve the proposal

Survey with fist of five

Participants express their current opinion about the direction of the discussion and the emerging proposal by voting with their fingers.

On a scale from 1 to 5, "How much closer do you think we are to an acceptable proposal ?" :

1 : far, far, far away
5 : We have reached an acceptable proposal

Sometimes, despite discussions and concerns the group as a whole might actually agree that there is an acceptable proposal.

Design proposals as experiment

Design a proposal as an experiment invites you to identify concerns that should be paid particular attention to in the evaluation.

What is the hypothesis?
How would we know if the decision has the intended impact?
How can we evaluate?
How would we be able to gauge or measure whether or not we need to revisit the decision and make adjustments, or try something else?
Can we set a date for an evaluation or retrospective?

I like to use this simple template when I formulate an experiment :

It forces us to formulate our experiment and structure them.

How to decide ?

Techniques to decide with consent.

Definitions

Consent decision making – the proposal is decided in the absent of qualified objection.
Consensus - everyone must agree with the proposal.
Good enough proposal - means the proposal is clear enough for you. You trust that the
team is capable of dealing with challenges and problems as they surface in a responsible manner.
Safe enough - refers to the danger of failing. Is it safe enough to try, and then inspect and adapt?

It’s way faster than consensus more inclusive and collaborative in nature than a democratic majority vote.

No thumbs down : a decision has been made and that the proposal has been
accepted.
- Thumbs sideways or closed fists
  - Ask those members to share why they voted like this
  - Clarify that the decision has been made
  - But it's always valuable to have their points of view
    It's not the time to reopen a debate
Thumbs down : The proposal didn’t go through.
- Ask the people to share their perspective on
  - Why this would be a bad thing ?
  - What harm it might cause ?
- They could find a way to reformulate the proposal so that everyone is happy with the content.

Declare intent and ask for objections

Sometimes you can declare decision mandate yourself. For decisions that don’t impact the whole team, don’t be afraid to simply state you intentions.

Clearly share what you intend do, and why.
Ask if anyone objects.
If no one objects, thank the team for their trust.

Working with objection is even more relevant in this Covid period. Asking for objection only and set a deadline will increase your team decision pace.

Dot voting

Dot‐voting is an effective voting and sorting technique to order suggestions by popularity.

Agree on how many dot‐votes each person gets
- If unsure, go for three dots each as a default
Each person can distribute the points as he/she want (3 dots on the same topic or 1 dot on 3 different post-its)
Once voting is done, rearrange the Post‐its according to the results

What to do when you are stuck ?

How to help the team have good, valuable and constructive discussions, that involve and engage everyone.

Make decisions smaller

One approach to make progress when stuck in a discussion around a proposal, or when you as team fail to agree on a way forward, is to reduce the size of the proposal or slice up the decisions to be made.

Delegate decision mandate

One approach to make faster progress can be to delegate to a smaller group (can be nominated or volunteers). That group hashes out the details of a proposal, AND are given mandate and trust to make the actual decision.

Clarify Statu Quo

Dont' take a decision just because you have to. Sometimes Status quo is a perfectly valid outcome.

If the proposal is not agreed upon :

Clarify what will remain the same
What will still be unclear
Which risks will remain unmitigated
...

When critical accountable decides

If the team fails to agree upon a decision, being stuck in discussions or having every proposal blocked, the default principle can be to delegate the decision to a single person, the accountable. It's the last resort solution.

To do so, accountability must be crystal clear (see Delegation Poker).

How to stimulate team wisdom ?

Make everyone heard

When a heated discussion has been going on for a while and only a few members vocally engage, call a timeout and do a round.

Ask everyone to briefly share :

What they think
How they feel the dialog is going
What opinion they have

Start with individual thinking, then share with the whole team.

Collaborative proposals (1-2-4-All)

It is a workshop format designed to quickly generate a collaborative and inclusive proposal.

It is a liberating structure documented here.

Everyone individually drafts a proposal in silence - 3'
In pair, share and explain their draft to each other - 2'
- Provide feedback on what they like and don’t like
The pair puts away their drafts and creates a joint proposal, building on both their drafts as inspiration - 3'
Each pair presents their proposal to another pair - 2'
The two pairs joins up as a group of four, designing a joint proposal. - 4'
Each group presents their proposal to the whole team.
Vote on most popular proposal.

How to structure discussions ?

How to help the team have good, valuable and constructive discussions, that involve and engage everyone.

Parking lot

To maintain focus / avoid the frustration of leaving important concerns unresolved :

capture the unanswered question on a Post‐it
Put it up on the parking‐lot area on a board

It acknowledges that the question is important, which can help people bring their focus back to the original discussion.

Timebox

Set a strict constraint on the time we allow ourselves to invest in a topic or in a discussion.

How to strengthen commitment ?

Maximize the probability of the agreements becoming reality by strengthening each individual’s commitment to the decisions.

Summarize actions and owners

For each and every ToDo, make sure there is a name associated with it.

DIBB rationale narrative

A framework to test if you can tell a comprehensive story on why you decided on what you did.

What DATA did you look at?
- What were your sources?
- Was it quantitative or qualitative?
Which INSIGHTS and conclusions did you draw from the data?
What are your BELIEFS now?
- Which hypotheses have you formulated?
Does this reasoning connect to the action you BET will reach the desired outcome?

It helps to have a structured dialog in which you invite people to challenge the data, insights and beliefs, providing other perspectives and alternatives, as opposed to have a purely opinion driven dialog.