You Need A Decision Log More Than You Know
Your output is a product of your decisions. Here's how you improve them.
Hey there đ
My name is Conor. Iâm helping shape the future of how teams work together at Hugo, centralized meeting notes that connect with your favorite tools.
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In most companies, your output is a product of your decisions. Itâs not easy to improve decision-making across your team, but itâs also not impossible. This is a way to test the quality of your decisions, break down knowledge silos, and systematically improve output over time.
How does your team make fast, effective decisions?
At Hugo, we sat down to figure out an approach to decision-making that optimizes for speed and decentralization. To do so, we asked ourselves these questions:
How can we empower more people to make their own decisions without having to seek permission first?
How can we reduce the number of people involved in each decision?
When new information is generated, how do we encourage past decisions to be reassessed and adjusted?
It seemed that the real reason we were ensuring decision oversight at every step was to prevent people from moving away from core goals and values. If decisions arenât aligned with business goals, customer goals, and each otherâs goals, then allowing more people to make decisions more often only creates problems.
We wanted an open team process that would be an effective antidote to misalignment, but without requiring oversight.
If youâre familiar with product design, you may be familiar with the idea of the âspec.â Itâs basically a document that outlines what an engineer is going to build. Often, there are edge cases that get left off the spec because they arenât immediately noticed. A good engineer, and one who is operating with a shared consciousness, knows that the edge cases are important â and they fill in those gaps on their own.
What if we took that idea â that people should be empowered to make decisions that relate to their work â and expanded on it?
Enter the Decision Log
Based on that question, we made a rule: If you think itâs necessary to make a decision, you can make it. You donât even need to talk to anyone else about it if you donât think you need to. But if itâs an important decision, youâve got to write it down, along with a future review date to compare what you expected to happen with the actual outcome.
Each decision log entry should be publicly available and address the following points:
The rationale behind the decision
The expected outcome
How the employee feels about the situation
A date to revisit the decision and see what happened
When you do this, you begin to identify biases in your thought process and become more effective in decision-making.
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow seems to agree with this idea:
Whenever youâre making a consequential decision . . . just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and . . . write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel?
Youâll also benefit from the decisions of others by being exposed to new mental models which you can then apply to your own challenges.
A decision log is an example of proactive sharing, a communication strategy that enables everyone in your organization to be in the know. Instead of waiting for information to come to you, you can empower everyone with the information they didnât even know they needed to learn.
đ Reads of the Week
Creating a Decision Journal
If the post above wasnât enough to convince you, check out Farnham Streetâs thoughts and templates on decision journals and how valuable they can be for personal decision-making.
Taking the Shine off the Apple
A must-read from Vicki Boykis: âBut all of a sudden, it started to look like maybe writing complex distributed systems was actually the easiest part of being a developer. The harder part was actually navigating through these behemoth company cultures.â
Being Glue
This presentation from my former colleague Tania Reilly talks about the importance of less glamorous work that needs to happen to make a team successful. This is one of my favorite takes on company culture.
Thanks for reading Future of Teamwork this week! Did anything stand out? Iâd love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at us and letâs chat đ
Until next time,
Conor