You’re not to blame for a failed strategy

You and I both know we are good decision makers, and it is everyone else that has a problem, right? Well, we are partly right. It’s not you or me that is the problem, its that making decisions gets more and more complex as more people become involved, even if you have the final say.

Take the simple example of deciding where to have dinner in Paris this evening. If it is you making the decision, and you’ve had a restaurant recommended by multiple people as a ‘simply must go’, you just go. Now bring your partner into the process. Your partner has had a different restaurant recommended to them. Or perhaps the restaurant you would like to go to specialises in seafood and your partner is not too keen on seafood. Now think about fussy kids became involved!

The complexity of team and team leader decision making results in a less than stella performance by executives globally. A survey of more than 2,200 executives by consulting firm McKinsey & Company, as reported in an article by Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony.i in 2009, showed that ‘only 28 per cent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 per cent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 per cent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent.’

Considering this, how do we define successful strategic decisions? 

Landing a man on the moon in 1969 was one of humankind’s greatest achievements, yet it had its problems along the way. Three astronauts died, it cost way more than originally projected, and although NASA met the deadline President Kennedy set in 1961 to achieve this massive feat ‘by the end of the decade’, the entire project took much longer than planned.

So what is a successful strategic decision? 

The measure I have adopted is the one of Paul C. Nutt in his book Why Decisions Failii where Nutt unpacks decades of research into 400 decisions made by managers of organisations from a broad range of industries and from many countries. Many companies are household names in the US and worldwide, like AT&T, Disney and Ford. Nutt’s criteria for judging a successful decision are whether the decision was ‘put to use’ and sustained over at least two years. While any number of arguments could be made for a different set of criteria, Nutt’s are tough but reasonable given that these are strategic decisions.

Nutt found that more than half of management decisions fail! That is staggering, given the time, money and will put into making them.

The secret sauce for making successful strategic decisions.  

The first part of the secret to making great strategic decisions concerns your team. It’s well understood a diverse team is essential. It’s also well understood that alignment of purpose of individuals to a team, and a team to the organisation’s purpose, is critical for success. The challenge with executive teams is that each team member has competing priorities. Seldom is there an overabundance of resources, hence team members need to fight for them. And some may be competing for your job. Sometimes the competition is beneficial, sometimes not.

The ability of you as team leader to foster a collaborative team is, of course, imperative. My experience of working with executive teams is, the more the team is open minded and orientated to creative thinking, the more collaborative they are. They need to know their business, but they need a fair understanding of every other part of the business, like you do. The opposite end of the scale is a “team” of siloed thinkers.

But this is not the end to the story. You also need to create a team that is synchronous.

Synchronous infers team members know and understand who is making a decision, and how and when it is being made.  
Synchronous infers team members know and understand who is making a decision, and how and when it is being made. Further, they understand their role in supporting each decision as it is relevant to them, and they have worked out how to do so efficiently and effectively.

Did you just think “Of course they do!”. Remarkably, unless you have explicitly had this conversation, not everyone is on the same page. We paint pictures in our mind and not one person’s picture looks like the next. So map the process.

Seriously. Try it. Map out how decisions are made by you and your team when it comes to bigger, strategic decisions. And what I know for sure is this … once everyone is aligned, creative and innovative ideas will emerge.

Written by Bryan Whitefield.

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