Three Step Consulting - Does your organisation make consistent decisions?

When I tell people that I can’t find even one organisation that claims to make consistent decisions they normally assume that it’s because I’ve only asked big corporations. Interesting how big corporations always get a bad press. But this is one situation where size doesn’t matter. Organisations with 5 employees gave the same response as those with 105,000.

The biggest cost saving measure of them all?
What comes next may be a bit painful for some people.

Imagine what the impact would be if your organisation made more timely and consistent decisions. Just think about what you could have done with the time spent in meetings and dealing with email tsunamis.

Now think about the time and effort spent recovering from a bad decision that had to be changed. Am I beginning to feel some reader’s discomfort? Perhaps I’d better not mention the effort and money spent trying to conceal poor decisions. I don’t want to cause palpitations.

In my experience the time and effort spent on “decisions” racks up high costs very quickly. The challenge is that whilst the impact on employee satisfaction and organisational efficiency is very apparent many organisations react by looking for solutions in other areas. Examples include sending bits offshore, across the board downsizing or introducing some new technology. These actions may well deliver some level of cost savings. But, will they help everyone make more consistent decisions? No. The root cause of inefficiency and low employee satisfaction remains unchanged.

The way to achieve the biggest cost savings is to get everyone in the organisation to work together and make consistent decisions.

Getting to Consistent Decisions
There is agreement that consistent decisions would be good thing. Concern centres on making it happen because in many organisations there is no history of consistent decisions ever being made. This seems like a reasonable concern. But most organisations have never had a specific goal of achieving consistent decisions. Perhaps that’s one reason why so many inconsistent decisions are made.

The key to making consistent decisions is a reference document with short, simple measurable goals that can be widely used as a touchstone to help all employees make good decisions easily and confidently. In short, they need a plan.

Mention plans in many companies and you get one of the following responses. The first response is that they are intending to work on a plan when the immediate business pressures come off. Translation: they are never going to do it because they don't understand the value. The second type of response is a smug knowing smile followed by a statement about how long they have spent crafting their plan. When the forklift truck delivers the plan and the desk groans under the weight you can see why it took so long to write. Unfortunately the end result is that no one is ever going to read it, let alone act upon it.

The traditional, weight tested, (often content free), strategic plan is of limited or no value to help employees make decisions. It felt good saying that. So if the strategic plan is of limited value, and organisations are delaying producing them anyway, something else is needed.

Do things differently
The traditional starting point for organisations building plans is to design a template of headings and then get managers to fill in the details. This traditional approach will not deliver consistent decisions for the organisation because it starts from the wrong place.

The first step in doing things differently is to extract the big picture strategy from the CEO’s head. It’s rarely consistently captured and well communicated. Understanding what top management cares about and how they want the organisation to move forward is not achieved by getting them to fill in a template. It’s accomplished by asking the right type of questions to pull out the information and then structuring it in a short, simple, clear, consistent and logical way.

The final model reflects the specific views of top management in about a dozen PowerPoint slides. Managers at the next level down then work from that model to create their plans in a consistent and concise manner.

Another difference is that some of the sections in the manager’s plans will be partially completed by top management. They are already laying out the kerbstones for the next level down to operate within and hence encourage consistent decisions.

Managers are given the model, a set of principles and a copy of their Directors plans. Their first step is to check that they understand the directions and guidance. Knowing how to ask “why?” is very important. They can then complete their plans and ensure that they too can respond to “why” questions from any part of the organisation.

The methodology then rolls down to the next levels with a strong focus on goals and measurements. Ultimately a goals cascade interlinks across the organisation.

Consistent plans help everyone make consistent decisions
The best results come when people work together with whoever in the organisation can help them meet their goals. Making the majority of goals public inside the organisation really helps and a further boost is delivered by linking goals to the compensation and appraisal systems. There are other essential steps to join up the plans but a key factor is getting people talking.

To me one of the best things about this methodology is that organisations experience an increase in the consistency of decisions being made before the plans are even completed. That’s the power of people working together. In many cases significant cost reductions are achieved by relatively minor actions. This method works.

In future whenever anyone in the organisation is faced with making a decision they will have a touchstone to help them make the best decision. It’s “their” plan. Equally importantly the plan also helps people explain why they made a particular decision. A great help in reducing “discussions”.

The whole process of getting agreement suddenly becomes much easier. Decisions are no longer just driven by the person who can argue their position longest. Now they are made based on a logical plan and clear principles structured into about a dozen PowerPoint slides. Now organisations can make consistent decisions.

How we help
At Three Step Consulting we help the "no plan" companies and the "too big a plan" companies implement a framework for making consistent decisions.

One of our clients describes it as bringing order to chaos. I'd describe it as helping top management bridge the space between the strategy in their head and the actions and decisions taken inside their organisation each day.

However described the result is smarter use of the organisations resources.

Malcolm Wicks
Director
Three Step Consulting Ltd

Malcolm is the principle architect of the DecisionDirector methodology used to help organisations make timely and consistent decisions. He is also well known for his work in helping clients make decisions based on their customer’s viewpoint.

Malcolm can be reached at:
+44 (0) 118 989 1107 +44 781 394 6021 Malcolm.Wicks@3sc.co.uk