Nicolas is CEO of the AI inbound conversion platform Chili Piper which has thrived on a 100% remote working culture since its inception in 2016.
Good decision making is an art form that is scarce in many organizations. This is evident from a recent study by McKinsey, which only indicated that 20% of organizations “to excel in decision-making.” This suggests that 80% of companies falter in their decision-making abilities. Traditionally, major decisions are solely in the hands of an organization’s leadership, but I propose a different approach.
By democratizing decision-making through the use of “decision memos,” multiple groups of employees can help inform leaders’ choices, weigh options, and provide countermeasures. While it may seem counterintuitive or inefficient at first glance, the exact opposite is true. Decision memos have multiple benefits: they can help streamline decision making for leaders on the go and on their own time, promote transparency, reduce meeting time, and eliminate presentation-intensive “meeting theater” scenarios. With many companies today operating with a hybrid or decentralized workforce, these benefits are more important than ever before for the health of the business.
Contents
What exactly is a “decision note” and why is it useful?
A decision memo is a collaborative document or communication channel where employees can solve organizational problems together by channeling multiple perspectives into a shared feedback loop. As a problem-solving tool, the decision memo creates a call to action from participating teams across all levels, demographics and backgrounds to create transparency and elevate employee voices to ensure different types of expertise are weighed before business-critical choices.
Decision memos help ensure that voices from different regions, cultures, genders, and backgrounds are part of the process. This gives organizational leadership a holistic set of viewpoints to consider and provides a deeper understanding of the impact of a decision on a company’s workforce, particularly those who work remotely. For example, researchers have found that many women find it difficult speaking in video conferences. Decision memos, or a similar process, can level the playing field for underrepresented members of a team while simultaneously weighing the pros and cons of a given decision, thanks to centralized feedback.
How do you make decision memos a success?
After establishing the value of a collective decision-making process for business growth, it is important to understand the implementation. What does the framework of a decision note look like? When should a company use one? How should teams create one? Here’s what teams need to know from start to finish when creating a decision note document.
• Identify and explain the problem. By asking a series of qualifying questions, teams can confirm that a problem exists and find a way to solve it. For example, how does the company function without a particular technology? What problems will the organization face if the status quo does not change? What drove the search for a solution?
• Make the business case. Dive deeper to identify the benefits of an important decision, as resources, money and time will need to be allocated and leadership will likely need to be convinced. Stakeholders need to know whether decisions about buying new technology or solving internal problems will deliver value, such as increased revenue, time savings or new growth paths.
• Identify all use cases. Ensure that process-based changes or a technology acquisition solution do more than solve a single problem. Teams need to ask themselves what a particular choice solves, what opportunities it creates and how it fits into the daily workflow. Will it disrupt or improve day-to-day operations?
• Optimize your capabilities. Cast a wide net and limit what is most effective. Is a particular option better or worse than others?
• Know the roles. Teams collaborating on a decision memo ultimately need to know their audience. Find out who will manage and move the partnership forward. The project manager must determine who will contribute; review; and add comments, edits, and recommendations to the decision memo, and filter out content to guide a stakeholder toward an effective decision.
• Know your stakeholder. Finally, make sure everyone knows which decision maker a memo is for. Once recommendations are streamlined to support a problem-solving approach, send them to the individual empowered to make the choice based on the collective recommendation provided.
What is the business impact?
Within my own organization, my team has experienced the positive impact of a decision memo system in one implementation. The process helped us save more than $70,000 while guiding a technology purchase decision that streamlined our customer-facing interactions. In this case, our collective information gathering process to solve a problem resulted in downstream cost savings and optimized efficiency.
The decision memo framework empowers key stakeholders to make informed choices on their own time, as leadership can review memos when needed outside business hours or during downtime. This eliminates possible bottlenecks due to limited availability, for example to hold real-time meetings.
I’ve found that memos can also create a more efficient feedback loop for problem solving because it draws on the collective expertise of teams (whether direct or from books, podcasts, or research). And most importantly, decision memos include potential success metrics, explanations, and goals. Combined with extensive record keeping of past decisions, business leaders gain a fully realized view of the pros and cons of a particular choice, opening up the opportunity to more carefully evaluate a new tool, product strategy, direction or decision. In the long run, the added reconnaissance can ultimately give leaders back the time they spend assessing the impact of business-critical calls.
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