Discover Practices and Tools To Make Effective Decisions

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe how influence strengthens decision-making.
Use best practices to influence decision-making.
Use tools for more effective decision-making.

Why Influence Matters in Decision-Making

One of the biggest challenges for cross-disciplinary teams is when their recommendation for a product, service, or experience is not brought to life. More often than not, the decision to move forward is not up to the team but to their project sponsor and stakeholders. Therefore, cross-disciplinary teams must be able to influence others in order to make effective decisions.

When teams have influence, they are able to persuade others to adopt a specific course of action. Influential teams are good at convincing without needing to exert force or issue an explicit command. They prioritize relationships so that they can guide, inform, and facilitate others to feel confident about their decision.

Best Practices to Influence Decision-Making

Bringing a new product, service, or experience to life often involves uncertainty and risk. The ability of teams to effectively influence decisions reduces uncertainty and risk by offering a clear narrative to stakeholders that focuses on the reasons and rationale for a recommendation.

Here are some strategies that cross-disciplinary design teams can use to influence decision-making.

Use narrative to influence decision-making.
Promote objective decision-making.
Embrace experimentation to bring decisions to life.

Use Narrative to Influence Decision-Making

The best narratives get all the stakeholders nodding even before decision-making begins. They build confidence not only through the evidence but also through the story they tell. People often process the world around them through stories. And the best stories focus on people and their journeys. They weave together a story that focuses on a challenge to be solved, why it’s important, the team behind the project, the journey for solving it, and the desired outcomes.

Here are some best practices for using narrative to drive effective decision-making.

Best Practice	What It Means	Why It’s Key
Include success criteria.	Identify standards, like key performance indicators (KPIs), that determine how successful a project is.	Keeps team, project sponsors, and key stakeholders aligned with the project’s original purpose and desired impact.
Be clear about the “why.”	Create a rationale that goes beyond increased profit and exposure, identifying a project's unique and inspiring purpose, belief, and cause.	Creates a compelling, more persuasive narrative through a deep look across evidence, diverse perspectives, and the criteria for success and balances user needs with company and stakeholder goals.
Gather objective evidence.	Compile experimentation results, qualitative user stories, quantitative data, outside research, and expert wisdom that support a project's “why.”	Supports a team’s recommendation and narrative and helps stakeholders make an informed decision.
Incorporate diverse perspectives	Include a team’s unique expertise and life experiences, and diverse users and outside experts to help address blindspots	Helps expand understanding and strengthen inclusive decision-making practices.
Examine impact and risks.	Look at assumptions, alternatives, and actively sought information that might disconfirm a team's initial hypotheses.	Provides an in-depth exploration of a project's positive and negative impact on individuals, communities, the market, and our planet, including the risk of indecision.

To learn more about how your team can examine the impact and consequences of ideas before plans are approved and locked, check out the Consequence Scanning tool in Resources.

Promote Objective Decision-Making

As Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, says, “It’s not about making the ‘right’ decision. It’s about making the decision right.” Often, teams make decisions unintentionally through fatigue or by defaulting to the most senior person in the room. This is why objective decision-making practices that rely on facts like quantifiable data, stakeholders’ interests, and company goals help teams make more effective, inclusive, and timely decisions.

Here are some practices you can use to promote objective decision-making.

Best Practice	What It Means	Why It’s Key
Establish decision-making criteria.	Use company goals and principles established through user wisdom and company strategy and values to create key standards to guide decision-making.	Establishes a prioritized framework to guide decision-making, such as using company goals or user perspectives to inform decisions.
Clarify goals and expectations.	Create key structure, like an agenda, decision-making criteria, and explicit information on how you make decisions, and share it ahead of a meeting or discussion.	Prepares everyone ahead of time for the decision-making process and allows time for exploring options and discussing them before making the decision.
Create a safe space for productive debate.	Develop transparent guidelines that help teams approach disagreement with an open mind and respect, such as asking questions instead of expressing opinions and intentionally addressing the tough questions.	Gives all team members a protocol for how to show up and engage in healthy debate.
Assess decision-readiness.	Play out scenarios so that both the team and stakeholders understand the implications of making a decision now versus experimenting more.	Helps teams and stakeholders understand if more experimentation is needed before reaching a decision, builds trust, and increases confidence in the work.
Make an inclusive decision.	Incorporate user stories, wisdom, and feedback as evidence to make an inclusive decision.	Uses the points of difference to guide the discussion, path forward, and ongoing experimentation.

To learn more about ways to incorporate diverse perspectives and voices into the decision-making process, check out the Idea Generation module on Trailhead.

Embrace Experimentation to Bring Decisions to Life

It’s normal for members of a cross-disciplinary team to question if they’re making the right decisions. If there’s an inclusive and productive debate before making a decision, new questions will likely arise. As a result, a new cycle of business experimentation begins to test new ideas quickly and safely.

Here are some best practices to use during business experimentation to help bring a design decision to life.

Best Practice

What It Means

Why It’s Key

Agree to disagree.

Establish an early agreement to commit to experimentation so team members can use the points of disagreement and questions to guide the next phase of work.

Identifies top questions and gaps of understanding after making a decision and creates a plan with activities to answer them.

Track decisions.

Set up a system to keep track of decisions and actions to understand better where teams have been and where they're going.

Helps teams figure out the right practices for continued commitment to action and easily share progress with stakeholders.

Set a course for action.

Create a new plan after making a decision to establish the next decision-making milestone.

Allows teams to answer new questions and create time to reflect on how they make decisions.

Tools for Objective Decision-Making

In addition to the practices above, you can use key design strategy tools—like the 5 Whys or Decision Logs—to help your team make effective decisions.

5 Whys

The 5 Whys is a brainstorming tool that can be used to identify the root causes of a problem. It lets you have a focused discussion without getting distracted by other topics. Here’s how it works. You start with a problem statement, examine why that problem exists, and then move through each problem until you identify a core issue that you can take action on.

How to Get Started

Come prepared with a problem statement. It can be a current issue or question or something from a past project you want to address. Use a template from an online collaborative tool like Miro to complete the exercise or a whiteboard to map out the question-asking process.

A laptop displays the initial problem statement and question.

Establish expectations. Let your team know that you're going to dig deeper to get to the root of the problem. And that this exercise is about the investigation, not blame.
Brainstorm. For your initial problem statement, ask the team, “Why did this happen?” Then, set a time limit and invite team members to add their responses. Ask team members to ground their responses in facts surrounding the event, not guesses about what might have happened.
For each of the responses generated, ask four more “Whys?” in succession. Try to move quickly from one “Why?” to the next so that you can narrow in on one key issue where you can focus your efforts and attention. You may not always take five rounds—go through the activity until you arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.

Decision Log

Using a decision log helps you break what can seem like an endless cycle of exploring options with your team, which often leads to analysis paralysis. Instead, you use a decision log to record each direction your team has considered and the pros and cons for future reference to prevent rehashing of ideas/options. Decision logs also help you document key discussions and report on project status so all stakeholders know which milestone you’re about to reach. You can create a spreadsheet or use an existing template to document the decision-making process.

How to Get Started

Level-set on key information and roles. Make sure your stakeholders are aware of their level of responsibility, role in decision-making, and project impact so everyone's on the same page in terms of priority and investment of resources.
Provide context. Summarize the nature of the decision, including its importance and impact on customer/user success and your organization's business goals. Also include constraints, like timeframe or budget concerns, that may impact the project outcome. For example, if your team is designing a new feature for a product, share how it affects the customer or user experience and contributes to your organization's business goals.
Document decision options. Brainstorm decision directions and use your decision log to record the pros and cons of each, like cost, timeframe, amount of team members needed, and more. It's a good idea to narrow it down to three or four directions before weighing your options.
Establish next steps. Determine what open questions you need to answer or actions you need to take before you move forward with a decision and notify the team members in charge of each action item.
Record your decision. Keep a record of your decision and the rationale for anyone in your company who may want to know how the team arrived at it.

Cloud Kicks and Effective Decision-making

Before the decision-making meeting, the Cloud Kicks team looks at project criteria for success and signals of success to create the criteria for decision-making. They decide that the decision should be grounded in evidence and objectivity.

Since the Live Tracker provided the company with the most visible (and visually appealing) way to service its customer's biggest pain point (visibility into the delivery process), the CEO prioritized it as the number-one feature, pushing the Digital Head Start to a later sprint. However, before they move forward, the team decides to do a consequence scanning workshop to understand the consequences of their decision. Specifically, they're worried about potential harm to the privacy and security of their users.

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