Learn How Effective Decisions Drive Inclusive Collaboration
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the importance of effective decision-making.
- Explain how understanding organizational context drives effective decision-making.
Realize Success and Meet Key Goals with Effective Decision-Making
It’s impossible for one person to see the whole picture. That is why cross-disciplinary teams have the ability to make and inform better decisions. Multiple perspectives and collective wisdom yield better results. And teams that have potentially opposing points of view can more effectively counter biases. However, it’s rare that a cross-disciplinary team is the ultimate decision-maker for their project. Their teams are designed to present and offer recommendations to their project sponsor. Therefore, an important role for the designer is to help facilitate effective decision-making for sponsors and stakeholders.
Effective, design-led decisions meet the project team’s success criteria and help achieve the company’s strategic goals and vision. They are made objectively, using facts like users’ experience, quantifiable data, stakeholders’ interests, and company goals. They don’t rely on one’s personal feelings, perspectives, interests, and biases. Additionally, they consider the positive and negative consequences on people, communities, and the planet.
Understand Context to Drive Better Decisions
For a cross-disciplinary team to help guide and inform effective decision-making, it's important to understand the company context. That starts by examining the company's goals, stakeholders' strategic objectives, and cultural factors. Once the team has that knowledge, they have a blueprint they can follow for how decisions are made. This focus on context creates decisions that align with company goals and a process that aligns with stakeholders' motivations.
As the designer, you can run a workshop with stakeholders to answer these key questions.
- What is the nature of the decision?
- What is the company’s organizational structure?
- How are decisions traditionally made?
- Who are the most influential stakeholders?
What Is the Nature of the Decision?
From a context perspective, take the time to understand the type of decision you’re making and whether the decision-making power lies within the team. Decision types include:
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Operational decisions: Simple, routine, and made day to day, usually at the individual or team level.
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Tactical decisions: Short to medium-term and slightly complex, like launching a new product or service. Middle and senior managers tend to make these decisions.
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Strategic decisions: Long-term and complex and aim to position the company as a market leader. Executive leaders make these decisions.
Additionally, to understand the importance of the decision, as a team, examine the pros and cons of indecision, thinking about what happens to the company, the users, and the work if there is no decision.
What Is the Company's Organizational Structure?
When you know your company’s organizational structure, you better understand how information flows, who has the authority to make decisions, and if the company culture is formal or informal. Here are some classic organizational structures.
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Hierarchical organization is typical for larger businesses and organizations. It relies on different levels of authority with a chain of command connecting multiple management levels within the organization. The decision-making process is typically formal and flows from the top down.
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Democratic (flat) organization is more typical of smaller companies that have few levels of management. It gives power to the people. Employees participate in decisions and influence their outcomes, often with little accounting for their job titles or seniority. The decision-making process is more informal and flows from the bottom up.
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Functional organization structures business around departments with specific responsibilities, like sales, marketing, and production. This clarifies who is responsible for what. It also establishes who makes decisions. For example, a team leader in marketing might report to their department head, who in turn works for an executive.
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Matrix organizations allow employees to work across departments. That means some individuals can report to more than one supervisor using solid and dotted-line reporting. More broadly, it describes the management of cross-functional, cross-business groups and cross-geography teams. Decision-making can be more complicated and require more than one stakeholder or team.
How Are Decisions Traditionally Made?
Often it’s unclear how decisions are made, so it may require reflecting on experiences and observation. Design decisions can emerge through fatigue, selecting the ideas on that table when the energy expires. Other times it’s through enthusiasm, and the loudest, most reputable group wins out. Or, in many cases, it is through authority in favor of the most senior individual. Here are some decision-making behaviors to keep a lookout for in your design workshops.
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GroupThink is a psychological phenomenon when consensus and a desire for harmony override considering alternatives, critique, or opposing points of view. Because of the importance of conformity, individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost. A quick tactic to overcome groupthink is to take 5 minutes for everyone to write down their choice individually. Then, one by one, each person can share their perspective and why they made their choice.
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Siloed mentality is when different teams or team members don’t purposely share valuable information. It encourages localized and disconnected decision-making, and there is no incentive to make changes that might solve another’s problem. Inviting stakeholders from different teams to inform decisions is one way to create more collaborative, and effective decisions.
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Halo effect is a cognitive bias in which the overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about a character. For instance, if someone is “likable” or attractive, they may also be perceived as more intelligent. It leads to biased judgements. One way to address the halo effect is to prioritize objectivity and base decisions on evidence.
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Overreliance on experts is when an organization has blind trust in expert opinions. This can lead to biases and alter outcomes because their expertise can sway a team to adapt their opinions and make overconfident judgements. Experts can help inform choices but should not be relied upon to make the final decision.
Who Are the Most Influential Stakeholders?
Understanding who your design stakeholders are and how you might align with them is important in decision-making. They are the network that ensures project success from a company perspective. For a context perspective, start by identifying who those people are and then surface why this work is important, why they should prioritize it, and how they can help make it real.
Effective decision-making is about helping stakeholders see the potential of your work and how it impacts them and your customers or end-users. Here are ways to get started in understanding your stakeholders.
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Be an active listener. Make time early in the project to meet with stakeholders and understand their expertise and interest in your project. This is not a moment for selling the project or ideas. It’s just a chance to ask questions, listen, write down responses, and build compassion and understanding for their unique perspective.
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Build a relationship. Think about your stakeholders as partners, not authorizers. That may mean intentionally building rapport by keeping them close to your progress with bite-size updates, questions, and ideas. Pay attention to how they respond and what they share back. This will give the team insight into what matters most to stakeholders while ensuring no surprises when decision-making time comes. The result of relationship building is creating a partnership with stakeholders to accomplish the work together. To learn more about tools you can use to build relationships by design, check out Tools for building relationships, by design in Resources.
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Convert advocates intentionally. Use Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping to visualize stakeholders, understand their motivations, and clarify their orientation toward your project. Most stakeholders will start as skeptics. It’s the team’s job to convert them to champions throughout the project. That is often accomplished by setting them up to be effective decision-makers.
To learn more about the Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping process, check out the Predictable Process module on Trailhead.
The Cloud Kicks Context
To learn more about using an understanding of your organization’s context to drive effective decision-making, let’s check in with our friends at Cloud Kicks.
Team lead Mary Evans, developer Vijay Lahiri, and community manager Erica Douglass—the core project team at Cloud Kicks— have created prototypes: The live tracker and digital head start. This is in response to their project challenge of how to turn customers into brand and product fans amidst supply chain disruptions.
Now, they’re ready to decide which prototype to move forward with into the minimum viable product (MVP) phase. Erica and Mary are leaning toward the live tracker based on stakeholder feedback and user insights. In contrast, Vijay is in favor of the digital head start because he can see users responding positively to the designed prototype. But they also know that this decision is not theirs alone. They know from completing the Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping process to identify key stakeholders that this decision involves key stakeholder groups, including customer success and manufacturing teams.
So to ensure effective decision-making, they ask questions to dive further into the company context, including:
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What is the nature of the decision? The teams’ recommendation involves designing an experience for their product, so this decision is tactical and involves senior approval.
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What is the company’s organizational structure? Cloud Kicks is a Democratic (flat) organization, but function also matters, and they know that the head of marketing is also interested in this project.
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How are decisions traditionally made? There’s a tendency for GroupThink at Cloud Kicks, and it’s a very consensus-driven culture. So the team needs to prepare to navigate this, building up evidence to support their recommendation and how it advances prioritized business goals.
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Who are the most influential stakeholders? Since the customer success team is a key stakeholder group, they make sure their recommendation also involves advancing this team’s mission of building customer trust.
Next, you learn about key practices and tools for effective decision-making.
Resources