How to make good decisions about growing your organization

Listen to Les McKeown read this blog post:

An inescapable point we emphasize over and over again in building Predictable Success is that the foundation of lasting, profitable organizational growth is the ability to make and implement consistently sound decisions.

Many otherwise great leaders trip themselves up by not having an over-arching framework for making important decisions, which means that they approach each decision without a clear initial starting point, in turn slowing down the process and confusing those around them.

"The foundation of lasting, profitable organizational growth is the ability to make consistently sound decisions." - Les McKeown, Founder and CEO, Predictable Success

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Here’s a framework you can use to change that:

Assuming you have good data to hand, all decision-making is a playoff between three things:

How fast you need or want to make the decision,
How transparent you want the process to be to others, and
How collaborative you want the decision-making process to be.

The Decision Making Triangle

Rarely can you have all three in play, as shown above. Usually, creating a high-quality decision involves compromising on, or ditching altogether, one of the three legs.

For example, making highly effective decisions about long-term strategy requires that we be both collaborative and transparent, but almost always, such decisions arrive slowly:

Strategic decision-making

Contrast that with what needs to happen when faced with a complex short-term problem (think Apollo 13 – and if you haven’t seen it, watch the movie – it’s a great lesson in how to make good decisions under pressure).

In this case, we need to be collaborative (every good idea needs to be heard), and we need to be fast. Transparency – communicating in detail as we go through the decision-making process – will only slow us up and must wait until after we’ve fixed the issue:

Problem-solving decision-making

The third option is where a leader needs to take a decision based on clear ethical or moral grounds – think of the PR decisions around the BP oil spill back in 2010 (not the operational decisions around fixing the spill – those fall into the second group above). Or, more recently the companies who rapidly ceased trading with Russia after the Ukraine invasion.

Here, ‘collaboration’ is usually unnecessary (the moral principles involved are usually quite clear enough), and invoking it is in fact a fudge and will make the resulting decision seem contrived and weaselly. We do need, however, to be both transparent and fast: