Good Decisions Start with Clear Advice

Decision making can be better and faster using simple practices like define the decision, name the decision owner, and consent. My colleague Alexis Gonzales-Black recently shared some of these practices in her blog post on decision making. 

An equally important step in the decision making process is knowing when you’re not quite ready to make a decision in a meeting. For moments like this we find it helpful to use the advice process to gather reactions from others and help refine your thinking before making a decision, outside of the meeting or in a future meeting. Here is a guide to the advice process, including examples of how we recently used advice with a client’s product team.

Before you dive into the advice process it’s helpful to take these two steps in any meeting:

• Confirm Agenda: At the start of the meeting, the facilitator should clarify the agenda items. This ensures that what we’re talking about is still the most important for this meeting moment (e.g. Last week we said we wanted to talk through our product prioritization list, is this still the most important item to start with today?).
• Clarify Need: Next, the facilitator should asks the decision owner “what do you need?”. Clarifying what the decision owner needs from the group gives the group clarity on how they need to show up to the conversation. (e.g. What do you need? Do you need to inform the group about a decision, advice from the group on a decision, or the group to consent to a decision?).

If the decision owner needs advice, move through these four steps:

Our practice card on advice provides a quick guide to the advice process described above.

We’ll continue to share decision-making practices and stories in August’s fall decision making series via LinkedIn and our blog. We also invite you to join us for one of our decision making webinars this November and December.