Producing Good Decisions… consistently!

culled from:activegarage.com

Decision making for entrepreneurs/business owners can be difficult, time consuming, arduous, fractious and distracting.  This article discusses a method for clarifying decisions and streamlining decision making.
There are four parties to every business decision:
- The facilitator
- The approver
- The contributors
- The informed parties
1. The facilitator – this person pushes everything, keeps the schedule, facilitates meetings, and makes sure the lines of communication stay open. There can only be one of these at a time.
2. The approver – There is only one of these for any decision. This is the final authority for the decision, they have the responsibility for the delivery of the business outcome of the decision. In some very rare cases you can have more than one approver, this requires a high degree of trust between the approvers and they need to have a single vision of the desired outcome. The approver needs to be designated pre-decision.
3. The Contributors – These are the individuals that execute the decision. The contributors have the technical expertise to provide input to the decision. It is very important to understand that the contributors do not need to agree with the decision, however, after the decision is made the facilitator and the contributors must support the decision. There should be 5 or less contributors.
4. The informed parties – The fourth group are those that are informed of the decision. They have no vote and no say. The facilitator is responsible for communicating the decision and the business outcome of the decision to those affected by the decision.
It is also important to understand that this process can also be used to drive efforts to produce business outcomes, not just decisions. with the contributors being the architects of the design, the facilitator keeping the schedule and coordinating actions among the contributors and informed (often implementers), the approver having the final say over the outcome quality.
Paying careful attention to the make-up of the decision team will greatly influence the quality and speed of the decision. Good teams produce good decisions… consistently!