Removing doubt from decisions
- May 28, 2024
- Teamwork , Meetings
Have you ever had someone claim that a decision was decided in a different way?
My role has changed recently to include another team. This has also included more interaction with other areas of the business and also the management team.
I am finding that making clear informed decisions is becoming more and more important. Some decisions require a quick decision. Some decisions require research and thought. Some decisions can be made by me. Some decisions involve me or require others to make a decision.
An article by Ian Mulvany highlighted a few areas that either I will be working on or observations about the roles of participants in meetings.
He mentioned the use of a decision log. I keep notes on all my meetings in Obsidian and use ClickUp (currently) to track the tasks I need to do. However any decisions made get represented as part of the notes or as tasks that come out of it. We have some architectural records but there is nowhere formally to capture others decisions made and subsequently access them easily when required. This is something I am going to play around with to see if and how it works.
He also makes an observation about participants:
I really liked the idea of being clear what role folks have in a decision making process - decision maker, advisor, recommender, executor or observer. A strong suggestion was to remove any observers from meetings. Why are those folk even there? Is it for politeness, or is it from habit?
I touched on this a little in a previous post where it was important to decide who is the main decision maker. Here he goes a bit further and breaks out other roles and questions whether some people should even be attending. We definitely have meetings where some people are clearly the executors and others where some are just observers.
It provides a framing for looking at the participants and deciding if they really need to be there. I like this.
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