4DQ
From GPWiki
Thursday 09 of September, 2010
 
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The Framework for Optimal Decision Making
Moving from Aspiration to Operation
A familiar story?
- “We take too much time to make ground-breaking decisions (in every sense of the word).”
- “We do too much second, even third, guessing...”
- “How do we get the right people at the right time participating in the right decisions?”
- “We need to push ourselves to be on the leading edge...”
- “We do a lot of backtracking and revisiting...”
- “We need to balance the inclusion of our people and the efficiency of our operation...”
- “We must achieve the alignment between our operating divisions...”
So broadly:
The ambition of clients is typically one of improvement, increasing of performance and operational effectiveness. In many businesses it's not that something feels severely broken. Rather, it’s wanting the kind of organization where each of the previous points have now been turned on its head. Just pause a few seconds to consider the enormity and return on investment of the change this would make.
- We know how to balance inclusion and efficiency.
- Our decision processes are designed to work on the right things at the right times.
- We know how to make high quality decisions efficiently: no wasted motion, no wasted time.
- We have replaced advocacy and presentation with dialog and inquiry.
- Everyone feels like we make high quality decisions.
- The time it takes for us to make a decision has been cut in half.
- Meetings actually feel productive.
Structured Visual Thinking and Decision Quality
What’s important to note is that building decision-making muscles - or making it a varsity sport as Bob Cronin likes to put it - doesn’t require organization redesign, new job descriptions, or any of the other expensive remedies organizations often try. Instead, the path to unleashing all the creative energy and bright thinking that already exists in clients already go through three key thoughts . . .
- Structure: A broad based understanding about how to organize a decision process, both in the small and in the large, to ensure adequate discovery of the relevant context, brilliant thinking about the range of possible solutions, sharp dialog when it comes to making trade-offs, and smart use of information.
- Visual: Organizations so overvalue words and impenetrable PowerPoint decks that they easily lose sight of the elegance and simplicity of visualization: to create context and persistence; to create the place and opportunity for sparking new thoughts, discovering unexpected juxtaposition, or weird notions simply because of how something sits next to something else. In some cases, the right way to do that is creating massive maps on walls 40 feet long, in other cases, a stack of index cards and some markers might be the right tool.
- Thinking: Sharp thinking is a function of many things. We want to be sure that we bring the very best thinking we can, and put our thinkers in spots where they can be the very best versions of themselves possible. From a process standpoint, this means bringing industrial-strength methods, frameworks, processes, and tools to bear—the right ones given the nature of the problem—to ensure that the people working the thing do what is necessary and sufficient to work the problem in a high-quality way.
The Solution Approach=
Creating an enterprise wide decision environment spanning decisions as large as $n million dollars (and many years) to decisions in the $10,000 to $50,000 range, with every stop along the way. Naturally this brings a different sort of rigor to one end of the continuum vs. the other. But at the core, there would be a common, scalable framework approach that the client will use regardless of the size of the decision.
At the heart of all this is a methodology, a set of principles and basic values that we call Decision Quality. The simplest way to think about it is that it is just that - a set of principles, a framework, and a tool set for solving hard problems - for making tough decisions. All that varies is the tool set. I wouldn’t use it to pick where to go to lunch, but I would use it to decide on how to remodel the restaurant.
A complete solution might look like this:
- Create the context Get everyone who cares about effectiveness, performance and improvement together for a short period to build the frame within which to think and operate, imagine and consider everything that matters. We would use our visualization tools and at least some combination of the first two 'd's' of 4D for this.
- Then and against this level set and vision - reflect and consult with the leadership team to put in place some simple rules, expectations, and processes for streamlining and improving decision making across the organization. Think of it as as decision matrix: For decisions that look like this, do these things. This will immediately make meetings more efficient and clean up some of the overhead associated with moving decisions through the organization.
- Train the group that we might call the “Leadership Forum” in the principles, framework, and tools they’ll need to play in the new sandbox.
Their new skills will show up in the following ways in the organization.
A change in the way people think and work:
Clear tools for transformation, change and operations...
- A complete array of newly structured, owned and cherished visual symbols against which to engage and explain what it all means. Ones that connect and tell a coherent and compelling story.
- Rich and elegant containers for thought processing. Templates and containers to capture new reasoning and finessing of earlier thoughts.
- Efficient tools and ways of taking a group quickly from one stage of maturity to another by rapid onboarding.
- People gathering colleagues together for a few hours to crack a hard problem and getting it done. No more death by a hundred hour-long meetings.
- More efficient meetings because the conversations are better structured. Anyone sitting in any meeting (assuming they’ve been trained) will be able to ask a handful of questions that will immediately focus the dialog.
- Complex decision processes move through the organization in days or weeks vs. months, quarters, and sometimes years.
- No diminishment in the quality of our dialogs and thinking. In fact it goes up.
- More innovative ideas form more interesting places and people.
- Elimination of rework, second guessing, and “revisiting.”
- More rational dialogs when it comes to trading off projects.
- Sharper participation in larger decision processes (see following).
Drawing Conclusions - Leaps of Imagination
Using Structured Visual Thinking + Decision Quality to crack the really big problems. This is the part where you take over a large room, cover the walls with material you can write on, and really go after a large complex problem. We often refer to the following example where we describe how one client told us that it normally takes them 15 months to move a project from inception to implementation: Half the time was spent in the decision making process; half in implementation.
Working our way, they cut that time roughly in half. Not a trivial thing.
The secret here is something we call decision compression, bringing together all the elements — a large room to work in, powerful visualization tools, structured dialog, industrial strength decision support, smart people—to “crush the problem”...
For smallish problems, trained people using the right tools would simply make those decisions and socialize them according to their signing authority. For larger problems, tiger teams would be rapidly pulled together to work decisions over the course of several hours or a couple of days, often under the wing of a senior person. For the big elephants, you would want to bring in some of our black belts to set up the process and mechanisms to work a problem over multiple days or weeks.
But the model and thought processes in all cases are EXACTLY THE SAME.
Putting it into practice
Executive Briefing
Spend a half day with the leadership group to dip toes in the water and see all of this come to life in person. Think of this as dialog meets show and tell.
Or,'
Expand that idea to a full day and use some of the time to wrestle one or more of your existing decisions to the ground. That’s a chargeable activity, something on the order of $xx for the day.
Consulting
The right way to do this is actually to use the tools described above to get cracking on an agreed exam question and enable the senior team and then the cascade a platform to make the decisions that would lead to how to implement better decision making and achieve the newly agreed vision and strategy.
Training
Training is $1,500 per person. There are some minimums and maximums, and yes for 60 people we would charge you less than that.
Wicked Problems
The big beastly problems, the kind that you’d feel good about bringing in black belt resources, are harder to scope without conversation. But a typical range is $x to $n. Before you start reaching for the smelling salts, look at those numbers again and add a zero to the end. In our experience, that’s the step-change difference between what it costs to work with us vs. one of the big consulting firms to get you to the same point. Except we do it faster as well.
