Closing the Decision Making Gap

Companies recognize the need to become more agile across strategy, execution, and operations, so they can respond to the accelerating pace of change and increasing levels of complexity. Many companies have implemented one or more Agile methodologies to speed up development lifecycles to reduce cycle time for delivering changes to systems and processes.

Change is non-linear, so cause and effect are no longer proportional. This means there are more factors to consider, which adds to the complexity of decision making. Relying on a few known factors (or causal patterns) may lead to spurious results and sub-optimal decisions, which can impact strategy, products, services, operations, customers, and stakeholders.

"Correlation is not Causation"

Very few companies have formal process and data models in place for guiding decision making and driving priorities. Almost every organization struggles with prioritizing change due to the overwhelming amount of information, juggling the number of projects and resources, and trying to manage complexity and uncertainty.

Prioritization involves a complex array of decisions: (these are just a few simple ones)

• Why are we doing this (ROI, Value, Compliance, Growth)?
• What actions should I take ?
• When should I involve other areas ?
• Who can get the job done ?
• Who should do each task and when are they available ?
• What is this going to cost ?
• Who and What is impacted (processes, resources, systems, data, stakeholders) ?

Individually, each of these decisions may appear simple. But, collectively they can quickly become overwhelming. This is a small subset of the volume and variability of factors and decisions that need to be made at increasing levels of speed (the velocity of decision making is continually increasing).

Decision making is no longer scalable as there are only so many meetings key resources (especially decision makers) can attend in order to keep pace with change. The number of decisions continues to grow as does the amount of information, so these challenges continue to outpace the ability of organizations to scale decision making only making prioritization more complex.

A better approach is to introduce a more “fluid” capability for prioritizing change allowing companies to make decisions at scale to keep pace with accelerating change and complexity.

The goal is to design and build a fluid prioritization model as core capability. The model can be established anywhere in the company, where it can be enhanced and matured using an organic approach.

Find out more in this initial article (Part 1 of 3), which explores the framework for fluid prioritization and discusses a scalable foundation for closing the decision making gap, which is a core competency for increasing your business agility.