Meet demand under high pressure: Establish a decision-making framework
In high-stress situations, your instincts take over. Some people behave like ostriches, burying their heads in the sand, while others act like headless chickens.
Now ask yourself: Would you trust any of these two to decide what to eat for lunch, let alone how the company should address a severely delayed initiative? Personally, I wouldn’t let poultry decide any of these things for me, but that’s just me.
What makes complex decisions tough is that there are too many unknowns to consider. Instead of striving for certainty and worrying about making mistakes, you need a decision-making framework that helps you make choices in uncertainty and continuously update based on new information.
Here is that framework:
Agree on the problem to be solved and why
If you start with a problem, ask why it matters to be solved to derive the objective. If you start with an objective instead, ask what significant obstacle is in your way to discover the right problem to solve. This is as much an investigative process as an alignment, so make sure to include your stakeholders.
Set the boundaries and rules of play
This includes constraints such as budgets, personnel, time, etc. as well as principles for what makes a good decision and how participants should behave during the decision-making process.
Widen your options
We often get stuck in an either/or scenario. Exploring alternative solutions can uncover novel ways to solve the problem. Focus on gathering and analyzing the most critical information rather than trying to obtain every possible detail, and include diverse perspectives in this process, not just different roles.
Embrace imperfection
No decision will ever be perfect. Aim for the best possible choice given the current circumstances. Make decisions based on probabilities rather than certainties. Establish a process that helps you experiment with different solutions and revise decisions as new information becomes available.
Establish feedback loops
Decide upfront what success looks like. For decisions with no clear end state, use success criteria and thresholds to determine when to pivot and when to persevere. Create systems for collecting and analyzing feedback from past decisions to refine your framework and improve future outcomes.
The outcome of the decision-making process can be documented and tracked as follows:
To [objective], we must [resolve problem] by testing [decisions] as verified by [data & signals].
I will most likely dive deeper into this format in another article. For now, the important part is to be able to record the decision so it promotes adaptability when new information emerges.
Vadim Feldman
Founder and Management Consultant
