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When managers want employees to come up with breakthroughs, they need to give people some time alone to ponder their craziest of ideas and follow their paths of association into unknown terrain. They should be urged to come up with ideas freely, without fear of judgment.
BREAKING NEWS, followed by retractions and clarifications is occurring more frequently as the news cycle gets faster and the competition to be first gets greater.
Studies have shown that speed and accuracy often have an inversely proportional relationship. This speed-accuracy trade-off presents itself in many aspects of our daily lives, from the news networks reporting election results and world events, officials and umpires reviewing instant replays, to parking a car on a busy street.
The speed-accuracy trade-off applies to business decision-making as well. Organizations that are overly focused on accuracy and slow to make decisions lose opportunities, incur inefficiencies and suffer morale issues. Conversely,
Here are 7 ways to help your organization accelerate its decision-making cadence:
#1 – Establish and Follow a Defined Process
Good leaders define, document, and publish their process for making decisions – particularly those of a recurring nature. By demystifying how decisions are made, the organization can better align its work so that it can feed into the decision-making process. Eliminating the “decision swirl” that comes when a decision process is unknown will enable decisions to flow faster.
#2 – Use a Decision Model for Complex, Multi-Criteria Decisions
When needing to make complex multi-criteria decisions (e.g., budget formulation), you should use a decision model, which includes a goal and weighted criteria. A decision model will provide a structure for evaluating alternatives and a basis for making the decision. Using a structured approach may start slower, but it will finish faster.
#3 – Know the Point of Inflection
Recalling those old math classes, the point of inflection is that point on a curve at which it changes from being concave to convex, or vice versa. In business terms, this is when a situation incurs a significant change or turning point. This occurs when the window of opportunity closes and the ideal time to decide has passed. Decisions should be approached with an understanding of when the decision needs to be made. Having a sense of urgency will speed decision-making.
#4 – Embrace the “Cone of Uncertainty”
Developing large and detailed business cases at the outset can take an extensive amount of time and effort and be highly inaccurate. An alternative approach is to use progressive elaboration, a technique for periodically improving the accuracy of a business case as more information becomes available. By updating a business case at predetermined checkpoints, the “cone of uncertainty” surrounding the cost and benefit estimates becomes smaller, much like predicting the path of a hurricane. This technique saves time and money.
#5 – Use Rules of Thumb to Verify Cost and Benefit Estimates
Rules of thumb, typically expressed in percentages, are general rules, norms, or benchmarks that are widely used as a basis for comparing estimates. Rules of thumb comparisons should be used to verify, not create, the cost and benefit estimates. By using rules of thumb, your organization can more quickly gain confidence in the business case and make a faster decision.
#6 – Don’t Make Big, One-Time Decisions
Making big, one-time decisions can be slow and risky. An alternative philosophy is to develop and execute strategy using a series of partial, incremental commitments. This allows organizations to: make faster, smaller, and less risky investment decisions; evaluate them periodically; and take tactical steps towards achieving a strategic goal. This philosophy can reduce risk and enable faster decisions.
#7 – Don’t Wait until Everyone Can Get in the Same Room
With telecommuting having doubled over the last decade, decision-making needs to accommodate the distributed and mobile workforce. Holding off on making decisions until everyone can be in the same room can have an impact on team productivity and morale, and result in lost opportunities. With a wide range of communication and group decision support tools available, decisions should continue to flow quickly.
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These 7 ways to make high velocity decisions yield the greatest benefit when they are applied in combination. With executive leadership, the risk associated with the speed-accuracy trade-off can be managed, and high velocity decision-making can become your competitive advantage. Make high velocity decision-making your next high velocity decision.
© 2018 Definitive Business Solutions. All Rights Reserved.
John Sammarco has thirty-five years of experience leading, managing, and consulting to top public and private sector organizations, and has over twenty years of experience in facilitating complex group decisions. John founded Definitive Business Solutions in 2003, which provides world-class group decision-making solutions to increase efficiency, boost ROI, and reduce risk associated with business and technology investments. In 2016, John developed Definitive Pro™, which helps groups build consensus and make multi-criteria decisions.
Although evidence clearly contributes to thoughtful policy-making, evidence cannot and should not drive policy decisions. When we make decisions, or policies, we are driven by a desire to achieve a set of goals.
An increasing wolf population has caused worries and protests from local communities, alarmed at possible predation against domestic livestock and the economic impact on their livelihoods. A new multi-criteria sorting method for organizing and analyzing complex decisions, based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used to solve the wolf attacks on livestock farms.
In my last blog Immigration Reform: Prioritizing the Four Pillars for a Common-Sense Solution, I recommended that Congress consider using a proven group decision-making process (e.g., the Analytic Hierarchy Process) to determine the relative importance of the four pillars (below) that have been put forth by the Trump Administration.
When a decision is decomposed into criteria and sub-criteria, and the relative importance of them is accurately determined, a decision model emerges. The decision model can then be used as a basis for evaluating the alternatives (in this case, sponsored bills) to arrive at a weighted score for each bill. The alternative bills can then be placed in ranked order using their weighted score to identify the most preferred bill that represents the greatest consensus of the group (in this case, Congress).
In this second part (Part II of II) of the Immigration Reform blog, I will illustrate how using a proven process can build more consensus and yield a better result than the “blind squirrel” approach that has been ineffective in solving this problem over many decades. With the help of the PBS NewsHour, who published Every Immigration Proposal in One Chart, and some colleagues and friends who were willing to share their judgments, I will illustrate the prioritization of the four pillars and the scoring of the alternative bills.
Prioritization of the Four Pillars
Until the members of Congress agree on whether they are going to address all four pillars (instead of only two or three), it will be difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate the alternative legislative proposals and achieve any consensus on a solution. For the purposes of this discussion, I will assume that the problem requires that all four pillars be addressed.
Using the Definitive Pro™ system, the participants were requested to self-identify as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, and then share their judgments by completing the pairwise comparison process described in the last blog).
They were selected to participate in such a way as to statistically mirror the party breakdown in the House of Representatives (Republicans: 238; Democrats: 193; Vacant: 4) and Senate (Republicans: 51; Democrats: 49; and Independents: 2) for a combined party breakdown of: Republicans: 54.2%; Democrats: 45.4%; and Independents: 0.4%.
In this illustrative exercise, the group determined that pillar one (Border Security: 31.7%) and pillar two (DACA: 35.6%) were substantially more important than pillar three (Diversity Lottery: 19.8%) and pillar four (Chain Migration: 12.8%). Within pillars one and two, additional pairwise comparisons were conducted to determine the relative importance of the sub-criteria with respect to the parent pillar, and then each sub-criterion received a proportionate share of the weight of the parent pillar.
Scoring of Alternative Bills
With the decision model in place, each participant then evaluated and scored five alternatives bills:
Using the summary descriptions provided by PBS NewsHour and a rating scale to measure the contribution to each criterion or sub-criterion, each bill was scored against each sub-criterion in pillars one and two, and pillars three and four. After the judgments were converted to weighted scores and aggregated, it was determined that the Grassley/Cotton/Purdue and Others: “The Secure and Succeed Act” bill scored the highest (61.5%) based on its across-the-board strength, scoring no lower than a “medium-low” on any pillar.
Of course, when solving complex problems such as immigration reform, an iterative approach should be employed, where variations of an alternative bill can be added and scored as a new alternative. This allows the group to hone in on the alternative that attains the highest possible contribution score. In addition, additional analyses can and should be conducted to evaluate the contribution score versus the cost of each bill (i.e., cost vs. benefit), as well as other factors.
In closing, it’s important to note that this illustrative example is not intended to be pass muster as a scientific study, nor is it intended to be predictive of what Congress may or may not do in the coming month(s). The purpose is to merely demonstrate that by using a proven process of accurately weighting criteria and scoring alternatives, Congress can more easily define and solve “the problem.” After decades of attempting to reform immigration, the time has come for them to consider using a group decision support process that has proven successful in government, business, and academia. Unfortunately, just as in business, people can sometimes be more comfortable with failure than change.
© 2018 Definitive Business Solutions. All Rights Reserved.
John Sammarco has thirty-five years of experience leading, managing, and consulting to top public and private sector organizations, and has over twenty years of experience in facilitating complex group decisions. John founded Definitive Business Solutions in 2003, which provides world-class group decision-making solutions to increase efficiency, boost ROI, and reduce risk associated with business and technology investments. In 2016, John developed Definitive Pro™, which helps groups build consensus and make multi-criteria decisions.
It’s clear that many leaders are failing to foster a sense of trust and loyalty in their employees. Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be the case. Managers who show great leadership qualities can inspire their teams to accomplish amazing things.
The national immigration reform debate rages on, while congressmen and women make a disorganized attempt to find a legislative proposal that will garner the necessary 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House of Representatives. Their haphazard approach is akin to a blind squirrel finding a nut in the backyard. It may happen occasionally, but it is neither efficient nor effective.
Congress should consider using a proven group decision-making process to determine the relative importance of the decision-making criteria (in this case, the four pillars) so that they can effectively evaluate the alternative legislative proposals and determine which one(s) contribute most to the priorities of the American people.
How to Share Your Judgments using our “Power Poll”
To see how this works and to share your judgments, click here using your smartphone, tablet, or laptop – and enter session code M1822. You will then be prompted to enter your email address and name so that we can establish a unique identity for you in the system. We will not use this info to contact you or share it with anyone. As such, feel free to make up an email address and name if you like, but note that you will not be able to send the results to your email account afterwards.
Rather than just selecting which pillar is the most important to you, we will use our Power Poll that leverages the power and simplicity of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) (see right).
Using our group decision support system (Definitive Pro™), you will be presented 6 unique comparisons involving two pillars at a time, known as a “pairwise comparison.” In each pairwise comparison (PwC), you will be asked to select which pillar is more important than the other. If you indicate that they are equal, you will move to the next comparison. If you select one over the other, you will be prompted to indicate how much more important (i.e., slightly, moderately, significantly, or extremely).
After you have completed all six PwCs, our software will instantly and accurately determine the relative importance of the criteria using your judgments. You will then be presented with options to view or email (to the email address you provided at login) your individual PwC results or the results of all participants (i.e., the group). The results will be presented in the form of weighting factors associated with each pillar, depicting their relative importance.
The Trump Administration Immigration Plan consists of four pillars (see below), as described by the United States Senate Republican Policy Committee, which was established in 1947.
Here is a summary of each of the four pillars:
Pillar One: Border Security
The framework would strengthen border security by creating a $25 billion trust fund for “the border wall system, ports of entry/exit, and northern border improvements.” It streamlines immigration adjudication and the removal of criminals, gang members, and illegal border-crossers.
Pillar Two: DACA
The administration’s framework would provide legal status for DACA recipients. It would also legalize other people who had been eligible for DACA, but who have not applied for it. The framework would grant recipients a 10- to 12-year path to citizenship, with work and education requirements.
Pillar Three: Border Security
The framework would eliminate the diversity visa program and reallocate visas currently apportioned to the program. The program provides green cards for up to 50,000 immigrants each year from countries with low rates of emigration to the U.S.
Pillar Four: Chain Migration
The administration’s framework would limit family-sponsored green cards to spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and green card holders. Most immigrants to the U.S. get their green cards because they have a family member who is a U.S. citizen or holds a green card. An unlimited number of green cards may be issued to the minor children, parents, and spouses of adult citizens.
In closing, prioritizing the four pillars is an important first step in selecting a common-sense solution to immigration reform. This step should be followed by creating and weighting measures (i.e., sub-pillars) for each pillar, identifying all the feasible legislative alternatives, and scoring them against each measure. Once the alternative scores have been aggregated, it will be clear which alternative best meets the goal (the subject of my next blog). By using a proven, multi-criteria decision-making methodology, congress could more easily build consensus when solving complex problems.
They might just find that nut in the backyard – and solve the immigration problem once and for all.
© 2018 Definitive Business Solutions. All Rights Reserved.
John Sammarco has thirty-five years of experience leading, managing, and consulting to top public and private sector organizations, and has over twenty years of experience in facilitating complex group decisions. John founded Definitive Business Solutions in 2003, which provides world-class group decision-making solutions to increase efficiency, boost ROI, and reduce risk associated with business and technology investments. In 2016, John developed Definitive Pro™, which helps groups build consensus and make multi-criteria decisions.
Cross-functional collaboration is essential to success: “Everyone gets so busy in their own silo that they forget the inter-related and inter-dependent nature of divisional goals.”
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
If you’re in a leadership position, decision making is part of your job. Your decisions will largely determine the type of the company you have moving forward. It doesn’t matter if you were a leader in the past or today. If you want to become a better leader, manager, employee, etc., it all starts with making better decisions.
