A simple approach to reaching decisions

Sometimes it is difficult to reach a decision when there are differing views - a start-up founder proposed a neat solution.

In a recent podcast, a founder was talking about the company she started with a partner and how they handled decisions where they didn’t agree about something.

With an equal amount of influence it was always likely they would need to make decisions where they held different opinions. The way they addressed this was that they would identify ahead of time who was the ultimate decision maker for the decision. They would then have the discussion and if it ended in deadlock then the designated person would make the call.

With the way they split the work, in a lot of cases it would be clear who the ultimate decision maker was however for those cases where there was any doubt this approach provided a simple solution.

We had a situation at work where someone had a strongly held opinion that was different from someone they were discussing it with. One party was much closer to the work needing to be done and so they had the overall vote. However the other party, as we didn’t have this framework in place, wasn’t able to easily let go of the decision.

Maybe this is something we need to introduce.

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