Hello !

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If you feel you have not achieved what was planned 😱 at the end of the quarter or the year, here is an actionable way to improve your team's performance. Making better and faster decisions.
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Get comfortable for your 5 minutes of sparks to hack.

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✨ Spark

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✏ Mindset reset: more risks lie in no decision

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"A" decision is better than "no" decision. Action is better than inaction. A wrong choice is better than no choice. (thanks, Nicolas Cole, for the summary)

This is why improving how you and your team make decisions is critical.

✏ Reversible vs irreversible decision: the analogy of the door

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In 2016, Jeff Bezos shared his big idea to make Amazon even more successful. He focused on making decisions faster: we should not wait to know everything (90-100%) before we decide. Waiting too long can stop new ideas from happening.

Bezos suggested looking at decisions in two ways:

• Type 1: one-way door: Big decisions that you can't change easily. These should be made carefully.
• Type 2: two-way doors. These are smaller decisions that you can change or undo. They should be made quickly to keep things moving.

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At Amazon, they call this one-way door = type 1 (If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t return to where you were before) or two-way doors = type 2.

Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high-judgment individuals or small groups. However, as organizations grow, they seem to tend to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. According to Jeff Bezos, this results in slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.

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✏ Consequential vs non-consequential :

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So besides the risk (type 1 or type 2) we take by making a decision, another consideration is the impact. It is consequential (significant impact) or not (low impact).

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So, the first thing we should do as a team is assess which decisions we are considering:

• All the inconsequential decisions can either be made quickly or delegated to one individual only or to another team.
• Consequential and irreversible (1-way door - the type 1 from Jeff Bezos): take your time and collect as much evidence as possible (here, we assume experimentation is not possible - this situation is scarce if we are honest).
• Consequential and reversible: the place to bring agile and experimentation to help you decide.

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✨ Hack

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✏ Off-line decision making

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For all the inconsequential decisions, leverage offline decision-making. For example, using video to share a report or a prototype and ask for feedback and decisions is powerful.

I do more than 15 videos per week, using Loom (today more than 310 videos)

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​✏ Use the right questions

In meetings, here are 3 questions that will help (force 😉) you to decide or prioritize :

What are the risks and impacts of this decision?

What are the risks or the opportunities we will miss by not making a decision now?

What else do we need to make a decision? If you stop gathering helpful information and there is no prospect of any on the horizon, make the decision.
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✏ Avoid vague decisions - allocate more time

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A vague or wavering decision opens the door to various interpretations, which will lead to confusion, doubts, and questions.
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If you feel hesitation creeping in, even when you have all the information you need to make a decision, force yourself.
Make a decision. Stand by it.

For that, make sure to keep time allocated to decisions: I like to force my teams to keep the last 15 minutes per hour of meeting to decide the next steps.

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✏ Better structure your meeting

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Structure your meeting by identifying when to decide versus when to share and interpret information and progress.

We call it the CAPTAIN meetings: Collect Analyse Plan.

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Collect: Share what evidence has been gathered since the last meeting.

This could be interviews your team has conducted, insights from your sales or field teams, or the result of market research.

The aim is to have everything collected in one place and one meeting, ensuring a comprehensive view of the new data collected.

Analyze: Debrief, interpret, debate, and argue.

The more friction, the better! It signals that you are looking at the collected evidence from multiple angles and leveraging the diversity and minority interpretations of the insights within your team.

Plan and Decide: how does what you learned influence our current plan? Which new decision need to be made?

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That's all for today!

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We teach this structure in our online acceleration program BOOST for early-stage teams in healthcare based on the insights from more than 500 healthcare teams coached.
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See you in two weeks. Keep the spark alive, and be intentional :).

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Hit reply to let me know if you liked this edition or if you tried these tips. I respond to every person who writes to me!

See you in two weeks. Keep the spark alive, and be intentional :)