One of my favorite exercises from workshops is helping others write out their decision-making process. For many people, they have never consciously thought about how they make decisions and the steps involved.
By asking them a series of questions, I can map out their decision process into clear steps. Once we have that, we can do a lot.
One participant in a workshop I recently hosted, had concerns about how long it took her to make decisions. She didn’t know how to make faster decisions or if that was even possible. I worked with her to map out her decision-making process into six steps that she followed with her team.
Right away, we started seeing that she was repeating some steps. She would brainstorm ideas with stakeholders in step two but then do something similar in step four. Her unspoken assumption was that some form of iteration was needed to get a group to make a decision.
She also realized that she was involving too many people after seeing the decision-making process from someone else. She really only needed a couple of VIP stakeholders instead of every possible stakeholder.
By making a few tweaks, she could remove certain steps altogether and reduce the work needed in other steps. All of this became obvious once she talked through her process and explained the rationale for each step.
Every leader can benefit from running this exercise with the team. There’s too many organizations that are still making decisions using outdated processes. They take too long, involve too many people and aren’t as effective as they could be.
You can’t do this in your head. You need to talk it out with someone.