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  troduction The Jn

Jaakko Pellosniemi

www.fingertip.org Twitter: @fingertipltd @Pellosniemi Layout: Christian Aarnio Infographics: Mira Visanto Printed by Libris Oy, Helsinki, Finland 2014 ISBN 978-952-93-4507-6 (sid.)

ISBN 978-952-93-4508-3 (PDF) ISBN 978-952-93-4509-0 (EPUB) Š Fingertip

→ Table of

Contents 1. Introduction To Decisions ……………………………………………… 9

What is a decision?…………………………………………………………… 11

Deciding is a necessity ……………………………………………………… 13

We are all decision-makers!………………………………………………… 15

Why focus on decisions?…………………………………………………… 17

2. Good Decision-Making …………………………………………………… 21

Decision-making can be hard……………………………………………… 22

From drafting to closing – the lifecycle of a decision…………………… 25

3. Going Social ………………………………………………………………… 39

Collaboration – making use of wisdom and knowledge………………… 40

Finding new solutions……………………………………………………… 47

Accountability – ensuring clarity on priorities and roles ………………… 51

Delivering the decision……………………………………………………… 57

The definition of Social Decision-Making………………………………… 61

4. The Holistic Approach …………………………………………………… 65

Learning – the triple loop…………………………………………………… 66

Finding the essential………………………………………………………… 72

Transparency as a basis for trust and a healthy work culture…………… 76

Workload control…………………………………………………………… 79

Passion!……………………………………………………………………… 86

The Power of emotions……………………………………………………… 88

Quality – better decision-making quality creates better results………… 91

What are the benefits? …………………………………………………… 100

5. True Leadership And Culture ………………………………………… 105

Decision-centric organizations ………………………………………… 106

The Fingertip Leadership Principles…………………………………… 114

6. Takeaways ……………………………………………………………… 121

→ Forward You’re holding the crystallization of a four year journey. A journey to the effectivity challenges of knowledge work and the frustration of fragmentation, overload and disconnect. A journey to understanding organizational structure, political and sociological models, human nature, our built-in tendency to laziness and the power engagement and emotions play in commitment and finding purpose.

I’m on my sixth start-up journey. What makes this one truly exceptional, is the universality of the answer. It resonates more powerfully than anything I’ve ever encountered before. Every now and then I meet a leader with a lifetime of experience, who after listening to my presentation exclaims a terrified disbelief at our reasoning. Those moments are the best, that’s when I know we’ve really found something ground breaking.

I’ve always had a strong desire to invent something that everybody could use and benefit from. It’s been a driving vision, to somehow contribute to making the world a slightly better place. Guess that makes me an idealist, or a dreamer – however way you want to see it. The future of work and mankind worries me. How will we make the best of the opportunities we have?

The revelation that decision-making is the core of organizational success, or the ruin and loss of excellent possibilities, hit me hard. Businesses fall because of decisions, but they also thrive from decisions. Better decisions can deliver organizations better business. It’s a simple fact, but an approach to business that has untapped potential. Realizing this massive opportunity, I decided to focus on building the most inspiring environment for decision-making!

Fingertip is a cloud-based application offering an inspirational environment for social decision-making which can be used on any device.

It is built on the Salesforces’ Force.com platform, giving us access to the largest enterprise ecosystem. Fingertip captures the core process of business in a polished user experience with excellent adoption results.

Fingertip is also a family, team and company. It started out with a guy and a laptop, and is now a family of over 40 people and growing.

A family of dedicated people with exceptional insight, knowledge and expertise contributing to building a decision-making revolution. All of us are passionate about decisions, share an eager attitude for learning and developing and for creating impact for our customers. We bring to the table a combination of enthusiasm, drive and skills to navigate to success. We have a proven ability to close deals and a strong track record of bringing products to market. Our board is a multitalented and versatile mix of world level leadership skills and insight.

Fingertip is a work culture and an attitude. It is transparent, it requires an attitude of putting yourself out there. We demand openness from each other, value the diversity of opinions, build on collaboration and reciprocity. We have a strong start-up culture and naturally use the Fingertip platform to develop the service and run all our work through it. We share our work and demand decision-centricity from day one from all joining in. The beauty is the possibility to constantly learn and get better at what we do.

We’ve turned decision-making into a holistic process which is rewarding, empowering, effective and a gamified experience. Fingertip makes decisions measurable, allowing bottlenecks and processes to be detected, enabling radical cost savings. Fingertip offers the possibility to invite partners and customers to co-create and decide together upon things that matter.

Fingertip comes from Finland Helsinki, a city with cold, dark, snowy winters and warm summers filled with light, thousands of lakes, birch and pine forests, a spectacular archipelago, home of beautiful design and a growing scene for innovative and successful start-ups. We are a small nation filled with persistent, talented and honest people.

I used to think of myself as a good decision-maker, it took a lot of scrutiny to figure out something very different. Are you ready to question your decision-making abilities? Are you ready to learn more of the possibilities and potential hidden in the concept of better made decisions?

Join us on the journey of social decision-making!

Telakkaranta, Helsinki September 2014 Jaakko Pellosniemi

8 • social decision-making – the introduction

1. Introduction To Decisions

social decision-making – the introduction • 9

It’s early morning. Stuck in traffic, you spill coffee on your shirt. A calendar entry reminds you that your son has soccer practice after school and needs new shoes. The company lawyer calls to tell you she’s resigning. The first one is easy: no need to return home for a clean shirt, you have one at the office.

Doesn’t even feel like a decision. The soccer shoes need a bit of thought. No time today to handle it yourself, but can’t send your son shopping alone.

Could he still use the old ones? Could he skip practice? A quick conversation with your brother, the little league soccer coach, who’s happy to help, solves problem number two. The resigning lawyer is a hard one. The timing is bad because of the ongoing merger. Should you offer her better benefits to make her stay? Should you be worried about credibility issues? The only decision possible at this point is to call an executive meeting to discuss the matter.

In the heat of it all, the decision to take a different route to work because of the traffic jam wasn’t even a conscious one.

10 • introduction to decisions

→ What is

a decision?

A decision is a choice made after considering alternative courses of action in a situation of uncertainty. A decision is the result of deciding. Coffee or tea, travel by train or plane, becoming an artist or a lawyer, whom to marry, whether to marry at all, wind surfing or sailing as a hobby, live in the city or by the lake, continue with a secure job or pursue the entrepreneurial dream – decisions surround us constantly. We make them subconsciously, we agonize over them; some of us are successful decision-makers, while others repeat the same mistakes. We make hundreds, even thousands, of decisions daily, most of which have few or no long-lasting effects on our life. What to wear to the office, which bus to take, where to have lunch. Simple decisions take us through our daily life. They are made and carried out almost automatically without much thought involved. We probably don’t even realize we’re deciding until the consequences are something other than what we anticipated.

A decision is not allowing events to take their course freely. Yes, consequences will follow regardless, but they will not have been influenced or decided upon on the basis of surrounding circumstances.

Decision-making is about deliberately opting for one choice in order to optimize a situation or outcome and not letting things take their own course. Deciding involves choosing, and it must be done proactively otherwise it results in a mere occurrence. Drifting through life without actively taking charge of distinct situations isn’t deciding.

Most of the decisions we make are simple and easy to make. They may involve several options, but in any easy choice one alternative is better than the other. Your car has broken down and you’re running low on money, but you need to get to the coast with your family for a vacation.

Will you accept your friend’s offer to borrow his car? You have been thinking about brushing up on your work skills when your boss offers to send you on a professional development course. Do you go?

introduction to decisions • 11

A Chinese farmer had only one horse, and one day the horse ran away. His neighbors came to condole over his terrible loss. The farmer said, “What makes you think it is so terrible? It may be, or it may not.”

A month later, the horse returned home, this time bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors became excited at the farmer’s good fortune. Such lovely strong horses! The farmer said, “What makes you think this is good fortune? It may be, or it may not.”

One day the farmer’s only son was thrown from one of the wild horses and broke his leg. All the neighbors were very distressed. Such bad luck, now you have no one to help you! The farmer said, “What makes you think it is bad?

It may be, or it may not.”

A war came, and every able-bodied man was conscripted and sent into battle. Only the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg, remained. The neighbors congratulated the farmer. “What makes you think this is good? It may be, or it may not.”, said the farmer.

12 • introduction to decisions

→ Deciding is

a necessity

So much is about perception, so much is about attitude, and still so often we fall into the world of musts and necessities. I have to work overtime.

I have to finish this today. I must hurry because I am already late. But if you think about it, what are the things you really must do? Easy – you have to eat, you have to sleep, you have to go to work, you have to take care of your children, you must pay taxes, obey laws and regulations…

Do you? Or do you have the possibility to decide otherwise? Generalizing, the only thing you have to do in life is make decisions. I can decide not to eat or not to sleep – it might have consequences, but it is a choice that can be made. Decision-making is a necessity in life.

In working life we are expected to make quick decisions with insufficient information, to multitask and stay focused, to constantly learn and develop, to innovate and create, to be positive and motivated – and all this preferably without any stress. In a world where the problem concerning information is not the lack, but the abundance of it, the ultimate challenge is to apply information, knowledge, and facts in decision-making. With explicit and precise information we are more likely to make better decisions with better outcomes to guide our actions.

We must accept the reality that we will never know everything. We will never know the whole truth, and we will never be able to assess anything with total accuracy. The truth changes depending on where you look at it from, and time will change the facts. This age may need intuition and insight, but it definitely requires the acknowledgement of the presence of constant change. Nevertheless, we may still have enough information for good decision-making. As the Chinese man said, “It may be, or it may not.”

The Latin root of the word decision means to cut away. So, a decision is to cut away the surrounding noise, enabling you to see a path to an objective and, by taking a decision or a series of decisions, follow that path with all its implications. This sounds simple, doesn’t it? Just cut away the surplus, the irrelevant, and go with the best alternative. So why are some decisions harder than others? What makes a choice hard is the introduction to decisions • 13

way the alternatives relate to each other. In a hard choice, one alternative is better in some ways, the other alternative is better in other ways, but neither is better than the other overall. This is where most of us start stumbling. You’re offered a dream job, but it’s located on the other side of the country. Accepting would mean new and interesting challenges, a substantial salary raise, and you living a three-hour flight away from your family. Or your family having to relocate – meaning your kids would be uprooted from their comfortable lives and your partner would have to find a new job. Suddenly, what seemed like a simple decision, accepting the dream job, turns into a very hard one because of the implications it would have on the lives of your loved ones.

14 • introduction to decisions

→ We are all

decision-makers!

Making decisions is a fundamental life skill. It is important to understand this, because acknowledging the role decision-making has in determining our life story is the start of having better control over it. Having stated that decision-making is a necessity in life, it is fairly easy to say that we are all decision-makers, at least in our personal lives. So what would you say if it was argued that we are all decision-makers at work as well – not just the managers, but every employee makes decisions, that decisions are actually made on all levels of work?

Let’s start with some easy ones: A janitor enters a room with a broken window. In what order should he clean? Should he alert security, or just call the window repair company? A teacher should be beginning the preschool class but is feeling really lousy, obviously coming down with the flu. Is there any point in calling the principal, who probably won’t be able to find a substitute at such short notice, or should she just try to make it through the day? Everyday situations, but situations that call for decisions all the same. And still we find it easier to define decision-making more as a managerial issue. Do you consider decision-making something that belongs in boardrooms, to people with power and authority? Is a specialist a decision-maker? Shouldn’t he be, since he has the expertise needed to evaluate the information, the alternatives, and decide on the optimal solution?

Most discussions of decision-making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

– Peter Drucker

introduction to decisions • 15

16 • introduction to decisions

→ Why focus

on decisions?

What is the best way to learn, to create the drive to seek solutions? What leads us to new possibilities and helps us develop and grow? What is the most powerful way to gain insight and understanding? Any ideas about how it could be accomplished? What could the answer be? Yes, questions!

Questions can lead a person or an organization to understand why they do what they do; they can unlock understanding about the way things work and help define what is essential and how something could be accomplished. Questions provide the opportunity to appreciate something from new perspectives. They help open our minds and urge us to use our understanding. Questions help us to escape from the prison of what we think we know and guide us to new and intriguing opportunities.

The ceiling lights in the kitchen keep burning out and you keep changing them. Asking why the lights burn out so quickly leads you to discovering an electrical fault. Once fixed, the issue is solved for good.

The firm’s monthly billing is dragging behind despite growing sales. In order to see beyond the problem and find the root cause, you need to ask why it is happening. Because of budget cuts, the amount of user licenses for the invoicing software has been reduced and the workload simply can’t be timely managed. Asking why gives us insight and helps us focus on solutions. Promoting questions builds a culture and environment where success is possible.

So, we’re all decision-makers, both at work and in life. We make decisions all the time, subconscious ones, simple ones, and sometimes extremely complex ones. Through decisions we determine where life takes us. Making hard decisions is where we get to exercise our normative power – the power to create reasons, to make oneself into the kind of person who prefers the lakeside to urban living and who values being passionate about work over a secure and steady income. Hard decisions give us the opportunity to put ourselves behind an option. Here’s where I stand. This is who I am. I am for lake views and hard work.

So, if decision-making is so important – and it is basically a process of encountering a choice, analyzing the options, making the choice, and introduction to decisions • 17

then living with the consequences – why then make anything but good decisions?

There are no bad ideas, only bad decisions. Bad decisions create good stories. Making bad decisions is a part of life, blaming others for your bad decisions is immature. We all know a handful of bad-decision quotes. Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.

In an ideal world, the individual acts rationally, considering all the available alternatives and potential solutions, reaching a clear objective, and arriving at the best choice through a process of comparison and calculation. In an ideal world, the problem can be defined without ambiguity, decision-making is free of the constraints of time and money, and you can always choose from a full range of alternative solutions with known consequences. Decision-making is clear and successful. In an ideal world.

In reality, we are pressed for time and resources. Because it’s impossible to process and understand all the necessary information, we too easily build simplified models to help us focus on the aspects that are most relevant to solving the problem. Maybe you are not an expert in the necessary field? Anticipating the consequences of decisions may be difficult. Maybe you can’t think of all the potential solutions and you choose to ignore the alternatives that are significantly different from the existing situation. Decisions become satisfactory compromises. In other words, they become “good enough”.

Why decisions? Why do we see growth potential in decision-making?

Why should we become decision-wise? The answer is obvious: By making better decisions we improve our chances of better outcomes.

18 • introduction to decisions

Better decisions, better outcomes

introduction to decisions • 19

20 • social decision-making – good decision-making

2. Good Decision-Making

social decision-making – good decision-making • 21

→ Decision-making can be hard

The noble experiment of prohibition resulting in an explosion of alcohol-related crime, and eventually a corrupt law enforcement and political system. The Trojans deciding to accept the victory gift from the Greeks, leading to the fall of Troy. Napoleon deciding to invade Russia and returned defeated with a fraction of his army remaining. The multiple mistakes leading to the human steering error that sank the Titanic. The 12 publishing houses that decided to reject J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter manuscript.

Twentieth Century Fox deciding to sign over all product-merchandising rights for any and all Star Wars films to George Lucas in exchange for a $20,000 cut in Lucas’s studio paycheck.

We’ve all made bad decisions and will probably continue doing so.

It’s human. Bad decisions are made everywhere. Even enormously important decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the best information and intentions are sometimes hopelessly flawed. Because decision-making is at the heart of our personal and professional lives, the big decisions that affect people’s lives, livelihoods, and well-being, can have enormous implications when they go terribly wrong.

It’s good to remember that bad decisions give us the opportunity to learn. Whether we choose to carry out this opportunity is another decision to be made, for better or worse. It is critical to try to understand badly made decisions, because they give us knowledge on how to navigate the complicated route of decision-making.

How do we know we have it right? Ironically, Eastman Kodak was one of the first companies to develop a digital camera, in 1975, but decided not to proceed with the innovation. They were afraid it would ruin their film business. Nokia had the phones, they had the app store with the apps, but they lacked the humility to understand the market’s need for regeneration and design. Sometimes we lack the ability to consider the effect of time.

Think of the old Chinese proverb: It may be, or it may not. Time changes the perspective; in the bigger picture, it even changes the outcomes.

Personal decision-making can be difficult and have negative consequences. How about in a family context? Spring break is coming up, 22 • good decision-making

time off from work and school. You haven’t seen your aging parents in a long time. Do you just buy the plane tickets and tell your wife and two teenagers that you’ve made “nice vacation plans” for the whole family without consulting them? Probably not, or if you do, chances are you won’t repeat the mistake. Your wife was looking forward to finally getting some home renovation done, your daughter was hoping for a trip to the beach, and your son had his mind set on skiing. A trip to visit the grandparents wasn’t on anybody else’s wish list. A different, more inclusive approach to deciding on your vacation plans might have led to a more satisfying outcome for all.

It’s important to involve the people who are affected by the decision in the decision-making process, otherwise you will never have all the necessary insight and will rarely gain the commitment necessary to execute the decision.

good decision-making • 23

Arriving at the office, my worry is obvious, and so is the urgent need for decision-making. Marcia resigning in the middle of the merger couldn’t have come at a worse time. It’s a blow. She’s been a treasure – smart, positive, well liked, extremely dependable, and thorough. What to do? The information should be immediately shared with the rest of the executives, but a nagging feeling stemming from experience keeps telling me to do otherwise. Everyone is jumpy at the moment; the speed and workload is immense. Just dropping the news that we’re now missing a key player might paralyze the team and its work, or even make someone else jump ship. I first want to understand what this means, and I want to have a ready solution to present. She was originally my hire. I need to figure this out.

Is this the first mistake? Going numb in a surprising situation, secondguessing myself, and losing valuable reaction time feeling uncertain about what to do?

24 • good decision-making

→ From drafting to

closing – the lifecycle of a decision

If a decision-making process is flawed and dysfunctional, decisions will go awry.

– Carly Fiorina

Process is good. It keeps us on track, helps us remember the essential phases, and keeps us from derailing. There is a reason why best practices are called so – they evoke quality and enable evolution and improvement.

And there is wisdom in the metaphor of not reinventing the wheel. It is wise to think about this for a minute. The life you are leading today is the result of past decisions and moments of indecision. An organization is nothing but the sum of the decisions it makes and executes. We want our life to be good. We want our organizations and businesses to triumph, our work to be meaningful, and our workplaces great. Since it’s all about decisions, and since decision-making is a process, shouldn’t we make that process as good as it possibly can be? Shouldn’t we become better at decision-making?

If you want tools, just google decision-making techniques. Good methodologies will definitely help you. But if you truly understand the potential of decision-making and the opportunities that developing the quality of your decisions will open up, you should do more than just facilitate some new working habits. You need to understand the lifecycle of decisions! Let’s get familiar with the Fingertip approach to decision-making.

Draft, Share, Propose & Decide, Execute, Evaluate, Close. It’s that simple.

From describing the decision all the way to closing it, all that is relevant is included in this lifecycle. good decision-making • 25

Fingertip thinks of a decision as a question, because by questioning, we make room for development. There is always something stimulating the need for a decision – it can be an idea, a worry, a problem, a hint, or maybe some advice. A decision can be a challenge, even an exclamation.

It is important to acknowledge that small worries may hold back major issues. It is wise to listen. A recurring headache might be nothing to worry about, but it might also be a symptom of something that needs attention. Your marketing assistant comes up with an innovative idea for the new product launch campaign. This triggers a need for deciding on how to proceed. Is it a go or no-go? The lease on your office is ending, do you decide to negotiate a new term, relocate, or maybe even make a purchase offer for the premises? The ending contract acts as a stimulus for a decision.

DrAfT

The drafting stage of a decision is important. Careful consideration and thought should be given to the framing of a decision. What is it we are actually considering? Looking at the problem through too narrow a frame can lead to us being blind to our true alternatives. In decision-making we often fail when framing the issues and grasping the scope of what we need to be looking at. This can easily result in misunderstanding the decision we are making, even barking up the wrong tree. The 5 WHYs are a good method for discovering the root cause and exploring the causeand-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. By repeatedly asking why, you can peel away the layers of symptoms and find the root cause of a problem. It’s a simple form of root cause analysis and is tremendously effective in helping you to identify what it is that needs to be decided on.

Think of the kitchen lights example from earlier. Asking “Why do the lights burn out so quickly?” led to the discovery of the electrical fault instead of constantly having to change the bulbs. Narrow framing of the 26 • good decision-making

problem could have kept us from finding the root cause and fixing the real issue.

SHAre

Phone-a-Friend, Ask-the-Expert – the concept of seeking advice, of collaborating for better outcomes – is basic and still something we often fail to properly exploit. After drafting and defining the decision, the next step is to share your decision, to invite the people with the necessary skills and expertise to participate in the decision-making process. It’s time to go social. Better decisions are made with a better understanding of information, possibilities, and solutions. In other words, better decisions are seldom reached in solitude.

Assigning responsibility in a decision is one of the keys to good decision-making. When sharing your decision, you need to assign accountability to people according to their role in the process. That way, everyone participating is aware of what is expected of them. Accountability also ensures that the right people offer input and are listened to. The Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) structure is a great tool when it comes to identifying employee roles within an organization, especially relating to a decision. These roles clearly define the expectations and responsibilities of the people participating in the decision-making.

Now is the time to join forces, talk, collaborate, listen, seek inputs, and be affected and influenced. Challenge the known and gather the unknown through discussion. Remember to honor dialogue, create alternatives and weigh them critically, and make sure you’re not biased.

Acknowledging the difference between whether we are brainstorming or deciding is essential. We tend to jump to conclusions, narrow our perspective, and then make favorable assumptions. In correlation to the hardness of the decision, be sure to leave sufficient space for collaboration. good decision-making • 27

It’s important to assess the level of agreement and emotions in order to determine the maturity for decision-making. Consider emotions; consider the feelings of the people collaborating in the decision-making. We tend to disregard our emotions, but at the same time we place great value in our own gut feelings, the intuition that tells us what the right thing to do is. In relation to our commitment, the consideration of emotions is important for the execution of decisions. The change in our mood helps us to detect when a decision is ready to be made. propoSe

DeCIDe

Proposing and the actual deciding follow. Naturally, how this is done depends on what kind of decision we are making. Do we need consensus? Is it a democratic decision? Do we vote? Is it autocratic? Does the boss dictate how it goes? Does someone have the right to veto? What is at stake? Do we optimize money, risks, or resources? A big strategic decision may require a formal board meeting, while low priority, simple choices can easily be made alone. Good decision-making requires that all participants know how the actual decision is to be made and in what time frame. Fingertip emphasizes the social aspect because it also creates early buy-in, which is valuable for successful execution. exeCuTe

Once the decision is made, it has no value unless it is effectively carried out. The execution phase is crucial.

Changes in life, both personal and in the workplace, require decisions.

Health-related decisions usually occur after you are completely fed up with yourself. So, you’ve decided to lose weight. Good for you – but there will be no impact unless you actually start exercising, eating healthier, and stick to your new regime. A high-priority decision was made to rapidly speed up the company’s marketing engine but the marketing 28 • good decision-making

manager’s unexpected long-term sick leave ground things to a halt.

With a lack of clear objectives and means, no additional resources, no participant buy-in, and undefined responsibilities, the decision resulted in frustration and wasted time.

Good execution is about commitment, knowing what has been decided and why and how the outcomes are to be reached. When we know what we are supposed to do, how, and why, the work is much more meaningful and the outcomes better. The sharing of what was decided is important. Communicate to all the relevant people rather than sitting on the information – transparency leads to commitment. Remember to take into consideration the people aspect when executing decisions. We reach better outcomes when we are motivated, so challenge and praise, and be explicit when determining accountability. Execute in a timely fashion and aim for effectiveness. evALuATe

Evaluation is about honesty, it’s about being open to the possibility of self-criticism, and it is definitely about having a willingness to learn.

Good decision-making requires stopping and looking. What happened?

How did it go? By definition, evaluation is the process of structured interpretation and providing meaning to the predicted or actual impacts of proposals, decisions, or results. In the decision-making process we set objectives for our outcomes and hopefully also for the actual process.

Looking at the results of our actions in the light of evaluation makes it possible for us to detect errors in our information. By expanding the approach beyond simply looking at how the plan was carried out to include an evaluation of what actually happened, we may find unintended outcomes and detect errors in our understanding, information, or process.

We may even find errors in our premises. This enables future success.

good decision-making • 29

A relatively big marketing investment decision was made to attend a two-day IT conference with the promise of in-booth sessions, demos, networking, and an expected attendance of 1,500 C-level executives. It was seen as a great opportunity for the company to gain more visibility in cooperation with a major player in the industry. Everyone was excited about the decision. Preparations were made to organize the trip, to get as much visibility as possible for the booth, to ensure a good spot, and to build the presentation.

The conference opened with no one arriving at the exhibition hall. The layout of the conference was such that no traffic was led through the area where the 300 exhibitors were located. First comes worry, then disbelief, and finally frustration. The marketing effort has gone to waste. The only visibility achieved was with the co-exhibitors, ending up with everyone pitching to competitors and a few big players even quitting the conference early.

Lots of money, work, and precious resources wasted, not to mention the initial enthusiasm ending in huge disappointment. A thorough evaluation of the facts and information on which the decision to attend were based showed it to be a valid one. The error was with the organizer of the conference, and they were provided with strong feedback. It was decided that in the future, events would be more comprehensively evaluated and extra attention paid to pre-event marketing. “Never blindly trust and always double check.�

30 • good decision-making

CLoSe We find pleasure in accomplishing and in the sense of control. Getting work done and cutting down the task list. Admiring the results of your work creates satisfaction, and work satisfaction is strongly correlated with work quality. Closure is the brain’s way of saying thank you for a job well done. Closure makes room for new opportunities – close one door and another will open. After a decision has been executed and evaluated, it should be closed. If the issue is solved and the proper steps of decision-making have been taken, it’s time to close the decision. This has nothing to do with forgetting; quite the contrary. Documenting is extremely relevant in the Fingertip approach to decision-making. Archiving and good search engines make it easy to track down a decision and all the related information, collaboration, and arguments leading to it. Documenting our decisions is a way of alleviating the distorting effects of hindsight bias, which is a nearly universal tendency to view past events in a positive light. It’s a very valuable, transparent asset that prevents us from forgetting why and how we ended up doing what we did.

After-work drinks at a bar, you exchange numbers with a nice guy and wait for him to call. After a few days you get frustrated. When he finally does call, you tell yourself that you were sure he was going to call all along. We tend to put a positive spin on these situations to make ourselves feel better. A negative investment decision seems to have been made in error when the stock suddenly rises. Good documenting of the information leading to the decision, and the opinions and input of everyone involved, prevents us from accusing each other when time decides to change the outcomes of our decision. Being able to trace how a decision was reached creates understanding of the organization’s decision-making culture. Yes, we made a sound decision with the available information, but history just took another course. And again, we may find something from the documented material that provides us with the opportunity to learn and evolve, something that will improve our decision-making in the future. good decision-making • 31

DESCRIBE

initial problem statement

DRAFT

CHALLENGE the known and gather new info by discussing

SHARE

RECORD all slightly important decisions

32 • good decision-making

ASSESS

PROPOSE

INVITE

CREATE

level of agreement and emotions

people, assign them roles and know what’s expected of you

alternatives and weight them critically

DECIDE

DECIDE

together promptly and on time

EVALUATE

decision quality, outcome and accuracy for learning purposes

EXECUTE

PRAISE

the right people for the right reasons

CLOSE

EVALUATE

CLEAN UP

to save mind space for new important decisions

good decision-making • 33

Feed

Details

Activities People & Roles

Files Mood

Relations

Quality

History

Decision Matrix

34 • good decision-making

Timing

Approval

Evaluation

Decide & deliver decisions in one place 24/7 A decision is a process and a project at the same time The decision lifecycle keeps everyone and everything on track and focused good decision-making • 35

FAIL Good decision-making is fundamental to the success of any organization.

However, over 50% of decisions fail.

-Paul Nutt

36 • good decision-making

Decisions fail because: • Built-in human laziness • Differences of opinion are unwelcome.

• Solutions actually address the wrong problems.

• Decision-making roles are unclear: who has the power to decide, and who should implement it.

• Decision amnesia: Decisions are passively forgotten.

• People do not commit to implementing the decisions.

• Communication does not involve the right people.

• Documentation is insufficient: transparency around the reasoning behind the decision is missing.

• People deviate from agreed decision process.

good decision-making • 37

38 • social decision-making – going social

3. Going Social

social decision-making – going social • 39

→ Collaboration

– making use of wisdom and knowledge

Ants have colonized almost every landmass on earth. Their success in so many different environments has been attributed to their social organization and their ability to modify habitats, tap resources, and defend themselves. Ants have division of labor, each individual ant, whether a scout, worker, drone, or queen, knows what their role is in support of the larger enterprise. They communicate using pheromones, sounds, and touch. They share information and react accordingly, and they have the ability to solve complex problems. Ants are collaborators.

Collaboration is the process of working together to complete a task and achieve shared goals. It’s a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.

A flat bicycle tire when riding to work. I’m at the gas station trying figure out how to work the tire pump. A younger guy is hovering around, waiting for his turn. He looks like a pro, like he knows what to do, but he’s not offering help. I ask for advice, he then happily shows me how to work the pump. A simple exchange of knowhow, resulting in a problem solved.

40 • going social

The meeting is running late. I won’t get out in time for Pilates. I probably won’t even have time for a quick jog. That’s the third time this week and I’m starting to feel annoyed at these meetings that go on and on. Now the debate is over choosing which interior decorating firm to use for the next big renovation site. Crap. The discussion is going in favor of a long-time partner I know is having an internal dispute that has affected their work. The new firm I’ve tested twice has proven to be very reliable, but no way am I going to say anything with the workload I have. It will end up with me doing all the work since no one else has done any business with the firm.

going social • 41

Often the answer to our problem is out there, but we fail to grasp it. We have the necessary information and knowledge around the conference table, but for some reason we don’t use it. The required insight might be something a colleague who sits on your corridor knows, or something the guy opposite you at lunch happens to have first-hand experience of.

Collaboration is a buzz. Teamwork benefits from diversity, cross-functionality, and collaboration, with peers providing support in tough situations. Collaboration has also been linked to increased innovation; it creates buy-in and empowerment, improves problem solving, and increases creativity and productivity.

Getting sales to work together with the marketing department and R&D to gain better customer understanding, making sure management fully understands and knows the customer journey and their need for the revamping of our product when making strategic decisions – all of these require and benefit from cross-department collaboration. In addition to our own organization, we have people involved in our work through different communities, subcontractors, freelancers, external experts, advisors, external review panels, customers – you name it. Work today, especially knowledge work, is rarely done in silos, at least not successfully. Did you outsource your graphic design? How do you make sure you’re adequately involved with your ad agency? How do you ensure you’re working towards the same goal?

Collaboration feels like the logical answer to better decision-making, to creating effectiveness in knowledge work. We humans are social animals after all. Collaboration has even been said to feel like a hug. It feels like such a natural and satisfying way of working. We learn relating to others. Through dialogue and interaction we can increase our understanding, make use of different approaches to widen our framing and suppress bias.

However, it’s good to remember that collaboration is the means, not the purpose. The point isn’t to collaborate for the sake of social interaction. The point isn’t to always involve everyone in everything. Collaboration also has a downside, and unfortunately we have all experienced it at some point.

42 • going social

A big software development project is running badly late. All allocated resources have been exhausted and one of the co-creators has faded from the project. To fully understand the situation and solve it, a diverse, cross-functional team is assembled. Relevant stakeholders are gathered. Experts are interviewed, information is collected, different faults are found, and the debate is lively. Approval is sought through collaboration, but then nothing happens. OK, we are still lacking insight and options, so even more data is collected and analyzed, and more stakeholders are included. More meetings, more conference calls, and the discussion goes on, but we are still lacking approval. No solution is found because no one knows when, where, how, or who should make the decision. Collaboration turns into a situation where the group freezes, no understanding is found, and therefore no decision is reached. We find ourselves in a more hugs, no decisions situation.

going social • 43

BOARD

PRODUCTION

MARKETING

MANAGEMENT

Social DecisionMaking

SALES

R&D

SERVICE

COMMUNITY

CUSTOMERS

44 • going social

PARTNERS

Collaboration fatigue, poor leadership failing to notice how much time and resources employees are using on the project, inaccurate objectives, certain people experiencing disconnect and hopelessness. We should always carry with us the curiosity of improving. If this isn’t working, what could we do differently? Just try again, but harder, or maybe change something?

Collaborating to reach a solution is an extremely relevant part of the social decision-making process. The sharing of a decision – the collaborating – is seen as the means to make sure the best brains, insight, knowledge, and skills are used in reaching a decision.

Beneficial collaboration relies on openness and knowledge sharing – a level of focus and accountability determined on the part of the organization and the accountable. The point is to share the information. You should work toward fostering a culture of openness and make use of true transparency. Could this information I have be of value to someone else? Could our business benefit from me sharing this insight? How can this be done without creating an information junkyard or flooding every channel with irrelevant data?

The options, techniques, and tools available are endless, but don’t get lost in the jungle. Yes, this era of cloud services, easy-to-use apps connecting information and people, and shared workspaces offers something suitable for everyone and every organization. Fingertip, of course, is a very profound option, and an inspiring environment for decision-making. But none of these methods will work unless the right attitude is adopted. We need to be willing to share, and we need to value reciprocity.

Responsibility lies with the one who has the insight. What would be the best way to deliver this information? A poster on the restroom door definitely gets attention but isn’t maybe appropriate for everything. Postits, emails, memos, notebooks, briefings, chatters, intranet solutions, corridor talk, bulletin boards, speaking up in meetings, participatory work methods – use whatever works best in your organization. The point is to have an open attitude toward sharing, and to encourage and reward it. going social • 45

Collaboration itself produces awareness through a shared purpose. It is an effective engine for finding alternatives and a powerful motivator when aiming for solutions. When collaboration is adopted as a work habit, we end up sharing proactively and we expect sharing in return through reciprocity. This, and the opportunity to influence, increases early buy-in and commitment, resulting in better execution later on.

Record this in Fingertip • All investment decisions • All board decisions • All decisions that impact employees • All decisions where different locations are involved • All decisions impacting customers, partners and subcontractors • All decisions impacting organizations processes or best practices • All disciplinary decisions • All decisions that add significant value • All decisions where broad commitment is needed • All internal contracts • All decisions describing authority, responsibility or job descriptions • All strategic and tactical decisions, objectives and goals • Questions that can’t be answered today • All exceptions to rules or best practices • Everything meeting the 3-3-3 criteria (see p. 60)

46 • going social

→ Finding

new solutions

Today the term brainstorming is used for all kinds of group ideation sessions. Originating from the 1940’s, it is based on the assumption that people produce more creative ideas as a group than individually. It relies on ideas being presented without judgment. The caricature is the conference room, the same room where all company meetings are held, filled with all sorts of people and expertise. Then, the request: “Okay, now let’s come up with some great ideas!” When inviting people to collaborate there should be a goal, a shared problem, a need to identify the result or a root cause, and there should be some structure.

A group helps provide a broader perspective, builds wider support for the decision, and gives individuals a sense of participation and engagement. Decision-making in groups may be slower, but a group is more likely to arrive at bold and even more extreme solutions than an individual.

Despite the obvious strength in numbers, we are all familiar with the problem of groupthink, which refers to the members striving to conform and adapt their views to the group. This means that an approach that is sensible in many ways can lead to a situation where the group makes a collective decision that none of the individual members would have made alone.

Think of the thunderstorm metaphor, – a sudden swirl of energy that gets everybody’s attention for a moment but is gone in an instant. How do you ensure that everyone feels comfortable sharing? How do you ensure that the group doesn’t end up experiencing groupthink – desiring harmony and making an irrational decision as a result? Accountability is needed, as are facilitation skills, and reliable documentation of the session is a must.

As important as dialogue is, speaking presents the threat of someone dominating the discussion and limiting ideas and solutions. A strong personality may dominate the storming of ideas. Presenting proposals is easier for an extrovert who feels comfortable in the spotlight and isn’t afraid of criticism. The challenge is to get people to say what they are really thinking. It’s hard to be open and innovative if you fear the response might be hostile or dismissive. going social • 47

Didn’t we already cover that? We tried that ages ago and it didn’t work. Could we please speed this up? It’s getting late. Are you seriously suggesting we go that way? It’ll never work! What is the value of collaborating if not everyone is contributing their best thinking? A facilitator can encourage the full participation of all involved and search for comprehensive solutions, promote mutual understanding, and foster an atmosphere of trust. It is important to acknowledge emotions with valuable indications. Emotions are also a good indicator of a group’s readiness to reach and make a decision.

Think about the ants – they seem to reach solutions to problems silently. Swarms of insects solve problems by leaving traces in their environment that influence the behavior of the other members. If speaking in

48 • going social

some situations creates unnecessary tension, what else could be used as an inspiring and encouraging approach to sharing ideas and information?

While writing is a powerful way of stating your opinions, it is also better protected from negative responses.

Brainswarming is a fairly new collaboration concept. It asks why we need to talk in the first place. The idea is to place the cart in front of the horse, state the problem, and give the participants time to write down their ideas. The obvious plus is that you get the shy people to contribute while diminishing the effect of bullies and dominators. You define the goal and the resources and start navigating toward a solution. Bottom-up thinkers will start to think about the resources and how to use them to reach a solution, while top-down thinkers will refine the goal and define their ideas from the top. Brainswarming is best done on Post-its, by drawing pictures. Again, documenting is important, as is the creation of ideas without judgment.

An effective swarming can also be carried out in a more “techie” fashion. Consider chatter. All participants in the decision-making state their ideas and write them down in the chatter feed. It’s immediately documented, visible to everyone collaborating, and can be easily referred to later. You also have the liking, polling, and praising possibilities.

Crowdsourcing is distributed problem solving. By distributing tasks to a large group of people, it’s possible to use collective intelligence, assess quality, and process work in parallel. Crowdsourcing is a new way of distributing work that connects labor demand and supply.

Virtual workers perform activities that range from simple to very specialized tasks. It is a very efficient method for information gathering, analysis, and idea hacking of decision-making. It can also be a cost-effective way to tap resources

going social • 49

Chatter message: @SarahReiss, @DiegoRelaford, @LauraBrinker, @WalterCanchola Marcia Smith gave her notice this morning, and she’s leaving at the end of this week. With the merger coming up, we need to quickly analyze the situation and its effects. I’m calling an executive meeting for 5 p.m. today.

Please give your comments to the discussion before the meeting. Think of relevant issues from your area of responsibility, especially concerning the merger and the role legal is playing in it. I’ll arrange to meet with Marcia myself to get a grasp of the situation and report to you. I’m feeling a bit troubled by the timing.

Waiting for your insights on this!

@LeroyPlumley, @SarahReiss, @DiegoRelaford, @LauraBrinker Thank you for sharing the information immediately. First reaction: troubled. How did the #legal audit of the DD go yesterday? I can’t find a memo/ file on the meeting!

@LeroyPlumley, @DiegoRelaford, @LauraBrinker, @WalterCanchola Well, that wasn’t expected news. She’s been with us for 7 years and seemed really content!

I’ll provide a list of open issues that need re-assigning or deciding for the meeting. I think we should also contact our law office. They should be immediately informed and will know where the DD stands.

@LeroyPlumley, @SarahReiss, @DiegoRelaford, @WalterCanchola Yes, troubling. From HR’s point of view the giving of notice is in accordance with the contract!

50 • going social

→ Accountability –

ensuring clarity on priorities and roles

Too many cooks in the kitchen. Everyone thinks they’re responsible and accountable, yet no one is. I believe I’m being consulted when I’m actually just being informed of what was decided. Someone should be consulted about the decision to move forward but they’re not. Poor communication, a lack of definition of responsibility, and no hands-on the actual doing.

While smaller teams can have more informal rules to keep track of responsibilities, in bigger teams with cross-department, inter-organizational, and external participation collaboration benefits from clearly assigned roles. It helps reduce confusion and leads to faster results, better commitment, and more effective execution. My personal motivation is much higher when I know what my role is in the decision-making process. Am I on the team to contribute to producing insight and carry out actual tasks? Am I in charge of the process or simply receiving needto-know information? Knowing this helps me plan my use of time, prioritize, and focus on what is essential.

The key to getting the most from true collaboration is accountability.

Assigning roles to the participants ensures that everyone knows what is expected from them. When you invite people and their skills to collaborate, assign the roles accordingly.

How to do this? Enter RACI. Responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. It’s simple, once adopted. RACI describes the participation by various roles in processes and projects. It is especially useful in clarifying roles and responsibilities in decision-making.

A is for Accountable, and the buck stops here. The person accountable has the final authority to approve the decision and is the one who signs off on the work and tasks for the responsible person. The role of accountable person should be assigned to only one person at a time.

R is for Responsible, the person actually doing the work, the doer, the one who gets the job done. They are the real workhorses of a decision. The going social • 51

R

Who is Responsible?

A

Who is Accountable?

C

Who is Consulted?

I

Who is Informed?

52 • going social

responsible person participates in the collaboration of decision-making and takes responsibility in the execution of decisions. You’re expected to actively produce and refine information and content, execute and create tasks, and influence the decision-making with your opinions.

C is for Consulted, those whose opinions are sought and who are kept in the loop. You have expertise that is needed for the decision. In this respect you are expected to play an active role, but in regard to other aspects and details you can relax. This position needs to be consulted prior to the final decision and calls for two-way communication. A decision can have many consulted people.

I is for Informed, the ones who are kept up to date on the progress, kept in the picture. The informed person needs to know about the decision or action, but require only one-way communication. You’re allowed to follow and comment on the decision-making, but not to influence it.

Of course, if you feel you have something essential to contribute to the decision-making, you can always ask the accountable person to upgrade your role to consulted or responsible.

To make sure a decision-making lifecycle doesn’t suffer from a sudden absence of accountability, it is good practice to name a Backup for the decision. This way, the decision will never stagnate because of one person falling ill or being otherwise unavailable.

going social • 53

As young and eager university student I was working at a well-known insurance company cold-calling customers. The leads were random and our hit rates for setting up meetings low. Cold calling was the traditional way of selling in the Nordic countries back then, and no huge alterations were planned.

After becoming frustrated, I proposed a new method to the sales director.

Instead of reaching out randomly, we should get customers interested first.

I suggested we invite them for lunch. The plan was to send customers lunch invitations in the form of a coupon – a nicely designed and fresh approach.

The lunch appointments with our sales reps would be booked later, online or by phone.

The sales director understood the potential and instantly took to the idea. It was delegated on to the sales manager to work with marketing and create the process together with the sales reps. Multiple meetings were held, but I was completely left out of the loop.

Finally, about four months after the initial idea, everything was ready and we were told to start calling the customers to set up the lunch appointments.

I realized that my original idea of an agile campaign process to quickly test something new had turned into one of lengthy planning and slow execution, with a lame-looking invitation sent just before the summer vacation. The campaign ended up producing OK results, but my belief in the processes, culture, and way of working had gone. I resigned pretty soon after.

54 • going social

A sad but unfortunately typical example of a good idea for a new process which is then planned and executed without involving the person with the original idea. Too often, decision-making and execution fail to make the best of commitment and buy-in. Could results have been achieved more easily with a lighter process? What if the execution hadn’t been so vague, if accountabilities had been clearer? Shouldn’t we always try to coach and motivate new generations of employees through involvement and praise? Would you have involved the young marketing trainee?

Early buy-in of stakeholders – why is it important?

Employees, freelancers, board members, owners, funders, advisors, trustees – the interested people who shape the working of an organization, customers, subcontractors, and the surrounding community. All of these are affected by the organization’s impacts and outcomes – the results of decisions made. Stakeholder buy-in, the process of getting these people to participate in the decision-making, is important for decision quality. The early commitment of all involved creates motivation to work toward the shared goal. With the right people and skills on board, the implementation of new strategies and plans will be easier and more effective. The possibility to influence and engage in the decision-making process not only creates strong co-ownership for the results, but also speeds up the execution of the decision.

going social • 55

An experienced and distinguished business leader is appointed chairman of the board of a big transport company. He’s pleased, literally at the top of the wheels. The first decision he faces is delivered to him in the form of four boxes of material and a finely drafted, detailed executive summary. He familiarizes himself with the material, but is puzzled to find only a decision proposal with no options whatsoever. It is a straightforward proposal with nothing to consider between. He has been given a decision with no actual power to decide.

The proposal is the sum of two years of hard work. As a complete newcomer, if he questions the proposal, he questions the word of hundreds of people. If he rejects the proposal, the work of hundreds might go to waste. The social pressure to approve is huge. Admittedly, everything seems to have been done meticulously, it’s just that the alternatives are missing. This bothers the new chairman. He starts to wonder, if the only power he really has as chairman is that of a rubber stamp, who then has the real power in the organization?

The story doesn’t tell how the decision proceeded, but the new chairman reached a profound personal understanding; the one holding true power is the one with the original idea.

56 • going social

→ Delivering

the decision

There is no such thing as an isolated decision. Everything is related to something. Decisions turn into tasks and plans, and they generate more decisions. Decisions are linked to strategies and outcomes of previous decisions. Decisions come in all shapes and forms. They vary in the way they are made and carried out. They vary in weight, significance, and scope.

What is at stake? How important is the decision? How badly do you need it to go just right? What are the risks? Is there a quality requirement?

Is the nature of the solution critical? When making crucial and important decisions, you need to pay attention to the quality of decision-making.

Maybe it’s something you need to collaborate over until you reach a consensus. Maybe the problem requires a lot of analysis and insight, but in the end the responsibility for deciding, the actual decision, is yours to make. When team buy-in is needed for the outcome, you don’t want to make autocratic decisions. And you don’t always want to involve your whole team in every decision you make because of the waste of resources and effectiveness. As a decision-maker and a leader, you have to adapt your style to suit the situation.

How much time do you have? Decision-making should be seen as a project! It’s worth it. It needs a beginning and an end, and it has resources and objectives attached to it. A schedule is honoring its importance – it creates a good sense of urgency. A decision should be made in a timely fashion and it should also be made on time. Time gives you the benefit of participation and the input of collaboration to contribute to decision quality and better outcomes. And the reality is that you don’t always have time for thoroughness and building commitment. Time is a relevant determiner of how a decision should be made.

When facing hard decisions, the solution is rarely a simple line from the problem to the solution. You often need to step into uncertainty; you need to embrace the fact that this is a challenge and that you’re not exactly sure of the answer. From a leadership point of view, from the accountable person’s point of view, this can be uncomfortable. But decisiveness is an important quality, especially in a leader. going social • 57

How to decide?

To determine how to proceed, the Vroom-Yetton decision model provides good stepping stones in the form of questions to help you determine what kind of decision-making process you should follow.

It is a series of seven yes and no questions that help you choose the suitable leadership approach for how to decide.

1. Is the technical quality of the decision very important? Meaning, what are the risks – are the consequences of failure significant?

2. Does a successful outcome depend on your team members' commitment to the decision? Must there be buy-in for the solution to work?

3. Do you have sufficient information to be able to make the decision on your own?

4. Is the problem well framed so that you can easily understand what needs to be addressed and what defines a good solution?

5. Are you reasonably sure that your team will accept your decision even if you make it yourself?

6. Are the goals of the team consistent with the goals the organization has set to define a successful solution?

7. Will there likely be conflict among the team as to which solution is best?

58 • going social

Timing is everything. When to move a decision from share to propose, and then on to decide? Knowing when you are ready to make the decision is a mixture of experience, knowledge, emotion, and courage. In the end it’s just about deciding. Just do it. Just decide it. If it wasn´t a consensus or democratic decision, if there was division of opinion or strong opposition, the actual deciding will need to be decisive. I need to have confidence in myself as decision-maker. Two opposing, two not taking stance, and two supporting. Maybe I’m making a huge mistake. Maybe I’m losing. That’s why collaboration is important – it gives you time to get buy-in. But as a leader, you probably have to make the decision anyway.

Leading good decision-making requires allowing for disagreement. But once the decision is made, it’s time to pick up the pieces, commit to the decision, and get everyone to participate in the execution.

Using Fingertip for social decision-making provides excellent data for determining the readiness and maturity of decision-making; a good amount of discussion within a decision, even though it might be in disagreement, is a good sign. Vitality and activity inside a decision indicate value and quality. The presence of emotions is extremely valuable in understanding the dynamics of the process. How are we feeling about this – worried or happy? Is the schedule set for the process holding? If it isn’t, the mood generally suffers and this affects quality. A good decision generates action. Participants start creating tasks. After all what is a good decision if it results in nothing happening?

going social • 59

DECISIONS WORTH WRITING DOWN

3/3/3

PEOPLE

DAYS

TASKS

Always create a new decision if three or more people are involved/ effected, if the actual decision approval is three days away, or the decision involves three or more tasks to be completed. With this great rule of thumb you will never again suffer from decision amnesia.

60 • going social

→ The definition of

Social Decision-Making

Social decision-making is a process making use of information and knowledge in a social context to gain insight and early buy-in and commitment for decision-making. Social decision-making is a holistic approach, capturing the entire lifecycle of a decision from the drafting, to sharing, proposing, deciding, executing, evaluating and finally the closing of a decision.

Each decision is assigned an accountable decision-maker, with the final decision-making power. The goal is to involve as many people as necessary and beneficiary for the problem solving and idea creation. This is reached through true collaboration built on diversity of opinions, alternatives, confrontation, good reasoning and transparency. Emotions are honored and used to determine the readiness for decision-making.

Decisions have accountable backups to avoid disconnect and ensure speedy progress in case of personnel replacements.

Social decision-making is a process and a project, it has a start and an end. It gathers all activities and details, builds a network of relations to other decisions, and creates a heat map of the organization. You get the big picture of the direction and what is essential. Linking the decision-making process to the actual outcome of the decision itself, so that it can be measured and mined for decision-making best practices, patterns that could provide leading indicators of changes in the business environment, and templates for future decision making.

Just as you can’t do Facebook without Facebook, social decision-making is a challenge without a supporting environment. A holistic decision-making platform brings rhythm and cost effectiveness to the process.

going social • 61

Functions of social decision-making: 1. Visually depicting what decision needs to be made, what the options are, what the weighted criteria are, and what information is relevant to the decision – it all leads focusing on what it essential.

2. Identifying and bringing together the right people, the right information and the right analysis tools.

3. Alerting decision makers to events and changing patterns that indicate the need to make a decision.

4. Allowing participants to discuss an issue, assess and capture assumptions, brainstorm and evaluate options, and agree on a course of action, thus enabling a new style of consensus-driven leadership.

5. Capturing details of the collaboration and the information and assumptions used to make decisions.

6. Providing decision tools, engines and methodologies to optimize decisions.

7. Reducing the risk posed by personal bias, group think, failure to consider contrary views and blindness to the secondary effects of a decision.

8. Improving the transparency of decisions by capturing the details of the decision-making process and recording the “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why” and “how” of a decision, including all inputs and assumptions.

9. Linking the decision-making process to the actual outcome of the decision itself, so that it can be measured and mined for decision-making best practices, patterns that could provide leading indicators of changes in the business environment, and templates for future decision making.

62 • going social

Social Decision-Making leads to organizational productivity and wellbeing.

going social • 63

64 • social decision-making – the holistic approach

4. The Holistic Approach

social decision-making – the holistic approach • 65

→ Learning

– the triple loop

Children learn by playing. Through play, children experiment with the world and learn the rules and social skills of interaction, sharing, and collaboration. Play facilitates the development of thinking, language, and emotional skills. Children make meaning of their environment through play.

Remember the example of ants as collaborators? Many animals can learn by imitation, but ants have been observed practicing interactive learning. The leader will teach a green nest-mate the route to newly discovered food through the process of tandem running. The follower obtains knowledge from its leading tutor, who is sensitive to the progress of the follower, slowing down when the follower lags behind and speeding up when the follower gets too close.

As a child, you watched your mother over and over again fold the laundry only to realize as an adult that you’re doing it the same way.

Burning your fingers once on the hot stove is usually enough to understand the need to be careful. Learning to ride a bike takes a few falls and cuts on the knees before you get the hang of it. The perfect tennis serve takes something like 10,000 repetitions to master, and a foreign language may never be mastered regardless of your efforts. Your first summer job may have taught you discipline and the importance of being on time, and a challenging and encouraging boss may have instilled in you the hunger for learning.

Learning is acquiring new and reinforcing existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, and preferences. Learning can involve synthesizing different types of information. Learning builds over time and is shaped by what we already know. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves. Changes produced by learning are relatively permanent.

Why should we learn? Why should we want to improve? Didn’t Darwin state that the fittest survive and that this is the basis for development? The speed of change is so fast that we rarely have time to reflect on it. The need for understanding, evaluating, and developing can be overwhelming. It could be fairly easy to argue that in the age of infor66 • the holistic approach

mation and global competition, the key to success is continuous learning and development. Individual education and learning is one aspect. From the business point of view, recruiting the right skills and wisdom to your team and organization is elementary, but so is the ability to use them effectively.

We have produced a whole industry to provide learning, developing, training, and best practices. There are armies of management consultants, coaches, trainers, and mentors roaming organizations, helping to improve their performance. Organizational change-management assistance, the development of coaching skills, process analysis, technology implementation, strategy development, and operational improvement services – all in the interest of improving our potential at success. But how do organizations learn? Organizational learning is a process of detecting and correcting error. It is noticing mistakes and fixing them.

Errors and mistakes are not flaws – they can be any feature of knowledge or understanding that inhibits learning.

“Eliminate the fear of failure. If a game goes wrong we throw a party for its developers and give them champagne to celebrate what they learnt.”

– Ilkka Paananen, Supercell

The lifecycle of decision-making encourages learning – learning through triple loops. The questioning approach provides learning by challenging the known and seeking improvement, gaining comprehension and making use of it. When evaluating the outcomes of decisions made, we may find errors in the execution and detect unintended consequences. What do we do? We try again, change the method or technique, and improve the system as it exists. the holistic approach • 67

3 DRAFT

DETECT ERROR IN PREMISE AND FIND A NEW ROUTE

SHARE

68 • the holistic approach

2

DETECT ERROR IN UNDERSTANDING, INFORMATION OR PROCESS

PROPOSE

DECIDE

1 EXECUTE

DETECT UNINTENDED CONSEQUENSES

EVALUATE

CLOSE

the holistic approach • 69

The single loop of learning enables us to do what we do, but do it better. We consider our actions and make small changes based on what worked before and what didn’t. We do things better but don’t question decisions. We’re using a thermostat to regulate the temperature. We’re following the rules.

Managers try to deliver monthly reporting, but deadlines are being continuously missed. A decision is made to send the management team on a time-management course. All return to work enlightened and try to turn the new learnings about time control into habits. There’s no improvement in hitting the monthly deadlines, however, since the underlying problem has nothing to do with the use of time, but is in fact an error in the system interface.

It may even influence our decision-making, teach us to make decisions right. So, did we make the right decision? We were having deadline issues and time management seemed like the logical solution to the problem we understood. The thermostat regulates the office temperature to the desired set point, but what if for some reason the temperature is set too high? What is the point if it works as it’s supposed to, if none of us enjoy working in sauna-like conditions?

Double-loop learning happens when the evaluation of decision outcomes leads us to question and consider our actions within the assumptions on which we have based our decision-making. We detect an error in our understanding or in the process. We start to observe ourselves.

What’s happening here? Why this outcome? Should we change the rules?

Is there something in the insight? Do we see patterns? Double-loop learning helps the decision-makers understand why a specific solution works better than another. During rapid change, double-loop learning is critical in determining the success of an organization. It forces us to reframe decisions and leads us to the root cause.

It’s not enough that the thermostat works as it was programmed to do. It needs to function so that the environment is suitable for productive work. Why aren’t the managers making the deadlines? Is there some70 • the holistic approach

thing here we’re missing? Double-loop learning concerns changing the objectives themselves and thus teaches us to make the right decisions.

Our readiness to question our insight and information and deepen our understanding creates learning that changes the way we make decisions.

It makes it possible for us to redesign the way our organization functions.

But what creates true transformation is triple-loop learning. When we detect error in our underlying premises, it is possible to find new routes to help us navigate our decision-making. It challenges us to understand how problems and solutions are related, even when separated by time and space. Triple-loop learning enables us to see how previous actions have created the conditions that led to our current problems. It teaches us to understand causality from a big-picture perspective. Through triple-loop learning, the organization learns how to learn and produces new commitment. It brings us to the fundamental questions of purpose and involves our principles and values. What is essential? Why are we as an organization doing this?

People learn from the past, yet too often organizations fail to look back over past decisions in order to learn from them. Fingertip provides tools both for capturing best practices and for looking back and analyzing decisions in hindsight. Learning from decision-making encourages us to build organizations with committed employees who have a clear understanding of purpose resulting in meaningful work lives and successful organizations. This is definitely something to aim for, and is all accomplished through learning.

the holistic approach • 71

→ Finding

the essential

A meeting is still an equivalent of decision-making. Those with decision-making power gather around conference tables to make decisions. A lot of time is spent listening to presentations, familiarizing ourselves with material and information. A lot of time is spent coordinating the next meetings, cross-checking calendars. And too much time is spent making micro decisions and discussing trivial, mundane issues that are often urgent but seldom important. Too many of those present are fingering their phones or in some way only vaguely engaged with the agenda. Too often we attend meetings without proper orientation to what is expected of us. Too often we come unprepared, or lamenting how too much time is spent sitting in meetings and feeling uncertain afterwards about what was actually decided.

There’s nothing new about this. You know the jokes, you know the guidance books. Meetings – the practical alternative to work. Are you lonely? Hold a meeting. Do you hate making decisions? Hold a meeting.

27 tips to improve your meetings. 5 tips for running effective meetings.

39 ways to improve meetings. Meetings suck. How to improve them.

Skip Monday morning meetings. Serve coffee to positively affect the brain’s performance. Smile like you mean it. Get rid of extra chairs in the meeting room. Working lunches, walking meetings, standing meetings. The list is endless.

This is nothing new, and definitely nothing to laugh about, since it’s all basically true. It’s what knowledge work is today – struggling with too much work, too many interruptions, perpetual deadlines, and unclear priorities and goals. Data streaming in from all windows and doors, 24/7 availability, the operational environment in constant change, the challenging economic conditions. Insight into what is relevant becomes more valuable than ever. As a leader, what is the essential issue that I should be focusing on? What should my organization, teams, and the individual employees focus on doing and accomplishing? Finding the essential is the quest, and focusing on the essential the treasure map.

The success of an organization is the product of small and big accom72 • the holistic approach

plishments, from making the right decisions and setting the right goals to effective execution. In a normal day at work you have the big goals, the big things the organizations needs to achieve, and you have the real job, your daily work. All of these things have to be taken care of. It’s inevitable that the two sometimes clash. So is the fact that when urgent and important clash, urgent always wins?

Most of us are constantly struggling with urgency, the curse of today’s working life. Our days consist of dealing with urgent matters instead of advancing important decisions. Stephen Covey’s famous advice to prioritize so that you are spending most of your time doing what is important instead of what is urgent, is brilliant. Focus on planning, preparation, prevention, relationship building, and on recognizing new opportunities.

This way you will also identify what to work on in the long run.

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

Decision-making can help us find the essential and focus on what is most important, your wildly important goals and your wildly important decisions. Once again, the point is that you need to frame correctly; you need to narrow your focus. Think juggling. You can handle one ball in the air, but a second one increases the risk of dropping a ball; to juggle three balls takes plenty of practice but can be learned. Managing more than three takes expertise. A classic example is air traffic control. The skies are filled with airplanes, and to keep them flying and landing safely the airspace has been divided into zones. The focus and responsibility has been narrowed so that control and guidance can be managed properly. To ensure safety, each aircraft is guided to land individually. the holistic approach • 73

You have to learn to say no to good ideas. If you want high performance you need wildly important goals to focus on. We simply can’t successfully multitask tens of important goals. Your organization may have hundreds of important goals, but you and your team can effectively focus on only one or two at a time. With the everyday work hassle going on, you need to make sure you don’t overload the individual or the team.

Be sure to distinguish between what is truly the top priority and what is the day job. You have to pick the battles you can win and make sure they are contributing to the war that’s being fought at the higher level.

Everything you do should be related to the bigger picture.

When we want to achieve new goals, to make something new happen, we don’t get there by reruns. We have to start doing things we’ve never done before. In order to successfully execute a decision we have to start doing – we need to act. A lag measure tells you if you’ve achieved the goal, and a lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal.

A lead measure is in your control – it’s something you can influence. So act on the lead measure, influence!

You’ve decided to lose weight. You can keep checking the scales, your lag measure, but what you need to act on are the lead measures: How many calories are you consuming? How much are you exercising? Act on decreasing your calorie intake and increasing the amount of exercise and you should be getting closer to your desired weight. Yes, the lag measures are easier to obtain than the leads, but it will be that much more motivating to notice the real influence your actions have on the decision.

Tennis is intriguing to watch because of the intensity and the shift of balance in the game. But think about watching the game and not knowing the score. Who won the point, the game, the set, the match?

You’re missing out on the thrill. Keep a compelling scoreboard. We play differently when keeping score. Seeing the influence of our actions produces engagement. When we don’t know the score, we disappear into the distraction of day-to-day operations and lose focus.

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Keep your lag and lead measures on a visual scorecard, update them regularly, and show them to all. It will compel action. The game is on.

When everyone on the team can see the score at a glance, the level of play rises. We can see what’s working, what’s not, and know what needs to be done. What can I do to influence the result? You’ve created the desire to win. Everyone can see what’s working and what adjustments are needed – and now they want to win. But remember to pick your battles so that the game is winnable.

Social decision-making rests on accountability to ensure buy-in, commitment, insight, and effective execution. Accountability is a personal commitment to the decision and to the team to move the decision forward and achieve the desired outcomes. The Four Disciplines of Execution also suggest that you build a cadence of accountability to ensure your wildly important goal actually happens. Now we’ve reached to the part where a meeting is needed. But it is short, focused, and highly motivating. Report on commitments, review the scorecard; learn from successes and failures, and plan; clear the path and make new commitments; help each other out. What did I succeed in last week, what was achieved, what can I do next to influence the scoreboard and the outcome of the decision? Everyone has a go. It’s highly efficient, purpose-oriented, engaging, and extremely instructive.

the holistic approach • 75

→ Transparency as

a basis for trust and a healthy work culture

Think of a little kid’s childish trust in fairness – bad guys get caught, stories have happy endings, and good things happen to good people. Your son gets bullied at school, lots of discussions between adults follow, and the kids are made to apologize. All well. What do you say the next day when he asks why the other boy, the one picking on him, had gotten a new bike from his parents as a reward for good behavior? That there’s probably something we don’t know – some missing information that led to the decision – or that life simply isn’t fair?

Treasures locked in deep vaults, discussions behind closed doors by those with power and authority, frightened whispers in dark corridors.

Stories are filled with hidden wisdoms, buried answers, quests leading to the pools of knowledge, cloaked figures guarding secrets. Knowledge is considered power, especially by those who possess it. The discriminating element of information is its accessibility. Are you capable of understanding it? Can you read, do you know the language? Can you manage the technology to access the data? Illiteracy exists on many levels. A whole different problem is the availability of information, or the openness of the process leading to the use of it.

Going running, you post your route, lap speed, heart rate, and even how you feel about the exercise online. Support from your peers – who might be total strangers but share the passion for running – motivates you and gives you the possibility to benchmark your condition. An organization where employees share their activity bracelet feeds with each other reports that since water-cooler discussions have been dealing with quality of sleep and amount of exercise, the trust among co-workers has gone up. A firm where every new employee is given a company credit card on the first day of work states that it’s actually an investment in employee morale, responsibility, and commitment.

Transparency implies openness, communication, and accountability. What are these if not the cornerstones of good decision-making?

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Does transparency mean that everything needs to be public? Is there a difference between transparency and clarity? Should I have access to all the financial facts, or should I have access to understanding the essential facts that affect us all? After all, is it the nudity that’s intriguing in the long run, or is it the stripping?

Wikileaks taught us that eventually, every single decision will leak.

Thus the only way to build true trust among stakeholders is transparency.

Trust, together with decisions, trust expressed in decisions, and trust as the cornerstone of all human interaction is the way to build meaningful organizations, communities, and societies.

Transparency is operating in a way that makes it easy for others to see what’s being done. It means a commitment to revealing who makes the decisions and providing understanding about the basic facts that affect everyone in the organization. Social decision-making relies on good use of information. For information to be available, a work culture that supports sharing is needed, and true collaboration can’t be accomplished without transparency.

Transparency means trusting the decisions that are being made, even the ones you are not involved in. When decision-making and its results are transparent and shared between those involved and those affected by the decisions, it creates trust and can lead to decision trust!

Careful what you say, Big Brother is watching. The concept of others seeing everything you’re doing also has a motivating impact. Social pressure can better your performance: you want to help the team do its best, and you want to show your best. From the employee point of view, when your boss and your colleagues see what you are working on, what you think, and how you feel, it can actually result in better management of work-related stress and improve how you cope with the workload. Sharing the burdens and successes of work leads to better work well-being.

Of course, from the management’s point of view it’s extremely important to know and understand what your people are doing. Are the the holistic approach • 77

resources being used wisely and effectively? Are there obstacles in the way of excellent performance you could and should as a leader help smooth out? Is someone doing too much, and are others under achieving? Transparency is a two-way street.

From a decision-making point of view, the advantages of transparency are obvious. Knowing how decisions are made, by whom, when, with what information, and with what arguments and risks, what the related feelings are, how decisions are executed and by whom, and what the decision is related to in the bigger picture – these all lead to trust.

When the decision-making process can be trusted to be of good quality, it is easier to commit to not only the easy and positive decisions, but also to the hard ones. A work community with decision trust will commit to executing tough decisions as well, and in this way will become more agile and capable of developing through change.

Faster

8x

78 • the holistic approach

→ Workload control

How are you? Stressed out. Distracted. Always in a hurry. Overcommitted. Stretched too thin. Lacking orientation. Struggling with prioritizing issues and time-management challenges.

Simply overloaded – having more work than can be accomplished comfortably.

Having work that is too difficult? Or are you underloaded with work that fails to use your skills and abilities? All of these can constitute a workload that is too stressful.

Constant communication and economic Less Email pressure force us to strive for a meaningful, even somewhat controllable balance at work. In some sense pressure in the workplace is unavoidable due to the demands of the modern working environment. It has become a given.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work hard to ease the amount of work-related stress we experience.

10x

the holistic approach • 79

You wake up. A small nagging sensation. Is it morning, or is it nighttime? Still dark outside. Almost drifting back to sleep. BOOM. Expense report. Meeting minutes. Offer presentation deadline. Hiring process. Performance reviews.

And suddenly you’re wide awake, head flooded with undone work, no sense of control. Heart rate equivalent to a serious workout, feeling utterly incapable of solving anything. And yes. It’s four o’clock in the morning.

80 • the holistic approach

We gain a sense of control by simply writing things down. One makes lists, one draws mind maps, one writes Post-its. Getting down to the issues that need solving or need to be done helps organize the yo-yo, random, flooding thoughts in our head. It calms us down. At least now you won’t forget what needs attending to. OK, task lists. The micro level of work, the small step of getting it out of your system and formulated into a task is actually a big step, as it brings relief. Checking the task off as done brings even more satisfaction. Take a step back – look at the bigger picture. The single task isn’t really random, but a piece of something bigger. Staring at a single piece of the puzzle gives you no idea what it is part of. But everything is related to something else. A task is related to a decision, maybe a plan that is related to another decision. Relations build new meaning, and meaning creates control.

The beauty of Fingertip’s universal task management is that it brings visibility for others. Your colleagues, your team, your work community, and your boss can all see what you’re coping with. By doing favors, asking for them, and returning them, we build team spirit, an anthill atmosphere, a feeling of volunteer work, a positive bustle. I’m not alone.

Together we can make it. As a team we will succeed. The energy of accomplishing together is impressive. It’s empowering. I’m part of this. No matter how miniature and narrow a single task may be, it’s vital in the big picture. On a Hollywood film set, delivering sandwiches is the task of a single person. But that person is proud of their job. When the film hits the box offices, it has been a joint effort. We made it happen together.

Understanding the meaning of what you’re doing and what it can result in in the long run creates control and eases stress.

The basic idea uniting the agile and lean methods is the way workload is controlled. Work is actually chopped into manageable portions. Agility is about doing the right things. How can we get the work done? How do we minimize the time wasted on useless work? How can we focus on the work that is really expected from us? Again, we arrive at the essential.

The way Fingertip handles work is trough relations, accountability, transparent tasking, Kanban cards, excellent visual scoreboards, and the holistic approach • 81

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

TO DO

Call Peter Check rooms for next week Test new survey Write reply to the board Arrange meeting with Jones

Pay the bills Email Alice Write new contract for Joe

TO DO

DOING

DONE

4

5

1

2

6

3

8

7

82 • the holistic approach

best-practice templates. Templates offer a frame; they grant permission to be a little lazy. Following agreed steps brings relief – you don’t have to memorize every single detail. Just as standard operational procedures are meant to ensure safety, they produce trust and a sense of control. If we don’t use any processes or templates we end up reinventing the wheel again and again – and the work piles up into eternity.

Kanban as a method for managing knowledge work emphasizes just-in-time delivery while not overloading the team members. In this approach, the process, from the definition of the task right through to its delivery, is displayed for all participants to see, and team members pull work from a queue. In order for the boss to be able to help build a balanced workload, the insight into what is actually being done and what is needed is vital. Fingertip provides this. The trend is towards becoming more and more self-organizing as employees and teams. Organizations are built flatter and decision-making is distributed closer to the actual work. One big advantage of this is that it makes it possible for us to help each other out. All of this contributes to easing of the workload and produces a good workflow and, hopefully, work satisfaction.

One reason we like games is because of the sense of accomplishment they bring. Congratulations, you’ve gained access to the next level! Your efforts are rewarded. Some like washing windows or ironing clothes because they love to instantly witness the results of their work. Knowledge work seldom produces a concrete result of a day’s work. Many love the quantified self-approach we’re being offered. Six-and-a-half active hours today, excellent. This definitely has a good effect on your health.

You finished 11 tasks and closed two decisions this week, very impressive.

Keep up with the good work. It’s addictive, encouraging, and motivating.

But all the while we have to be making the essential decisions. We have to make sure we have enough of what is truly important, because otherwise we’ll just end up managing tasks. Controlled, yes, but definitely not productive and innovative in the long run. Decision-making is what brings the insight into, and the understanding of, what needs to be done. the holistic approach • 83

PASSION =

84 • the holistic approach

MEANING × INFLUENCE × ENGAGEMENT

the holistic approach • 85

→ Passion!

Passion. Intense desire felt by a person for something or someone.

An emotional impulse that prevails over reason. To love passionately. To be lost in passion.

Ping-pong tables, games rooms, yoga classes, barista-style coffee machines, innovative workspaces, office saunas, and company bikes – finally we’ve come to the understanding that the definition of real work isn’t a hard-ass attitude. Laughter lengthens life, and shared laughter builds trust and strengthens and unites the team. Mutual joy leaves a lingering and positive memory. Sitting in the corner coffee shop, I might actually be doing some serious thinking that leads to real work revelations. Jogging at the end of day makes my thoughts flow and the answer to a very troubling problem may appear. Time to recover from the strain of work is needed and has to be respected. Knowledge work can’t be restricted to working hours; our subconscious doesn’t simply shut down when we leave the office.

Work takes such a huge proportion of our daily life that it’s easy to argue that it should provide satisfaction and enjoyment. But feeling satisfied isn’t just about having fun. On top of good behavior, politeness, and consideration we should do more. And it’s not that we all need to be friends or even actually like each other. Yves Morieux brings a wonderful revelation to the old adage that in order for us to make people co-operate, we would need to make them like each other. That by improving interpersonal feelings, the more people will like each other, the more they would cooperate. He claims it is totally wrong, that it is even counterproductive. The more we like each other, the more we avoid the real co-operation that would strain our relationships by imposing tough tradeoffs. Trying to be nice to each other sends us off track in our decision-making.

In a good workplace we share our know-how and provide constructive feedback when asked. More importantly, we do this without asking.

Work satisfaction is built from being acknowledged, getting my work and ideas seen and heard, being recognized for the effect my work has – by 86 • the holistic approach

my boss, my colleagues, and customers. Encouragement and feedback create meaning and an experience of purpose.

Clear goals, immediate feedback, and a balance between opportunity and capacity – the three conditions Mihály Csíkszentmihályi lays out in order to achieve what he calls “flow”. Flow is defined as a state in which challenges and skills are equally matched. It’s the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment of the process of the activity. Because flow is associated with achievement, its development can increase workplace satisfaction and accomplishment.

Passion is one of the reasons an individual is motivated for an occupation. When people genuinely enjoy their profession and are motivated by their passion, they tend to be more satisfied with their work. I might be passionate about healing people and thus study to become a doctor. I could be passionate about vegetarian food and find myself living a dream running my own vegetarian restaurant. But these choices and passions don’t necessarily result in experiencing passion in our daily work.

So, do we need passion in our working life? Satisfied employees produce greater revenues, and committed employees are more satisfied for sure. The Formula of Passion states that passion and deep enthusiasm are achieved through purpose, influence, and engagement. It’s not enough that I’m involved in something that I consider to be purposeful if what I have to offer to it is unimportant, lacking true influence on the outcome.

When adding the possibility of engagement to the ability to influence something that has purpose, we arrive at Fingertip’s definition of passion. In order for the purpose and influence to last, human interaction is needed. By sharing, interacting, and engaging in dialogue we deepen our relationship with the decision and the issue at hand.

The actual decision is the moment of truth. Now I’m going to lose weight, I’m ready to do it. Let’s decide! We use the formula to make the decision-making happen. We use the passion to build the decision.

The best decisions don’t even feel like decisions – because they just feel so right. the holistic approach • 87

→ The Power

of emotions

Don’t mix work and emotions. Don’t make decisions in outbursts of feelings. You’re not supposed to be emotional at the office. Emotions and being emotional are two different things. Gut feeling, sound reasoning – rationality versus emotionality. Thinking and brains, or the certainty you feel in your heart? Decisiveness, anxiety, uncertainty, fear – it’s obvious that our decision-making is affected by emotions, whether or not we want it to be. Emotions are an essential part of any human decision-making and planning process, and the famous distinction made between reason and emotion is becoming blurred.

It used to be very clear. The boundaries between private life and work were firmly maintained. Emotional behavior wasn’t considered professional conduct and didn’t belong to the work environment. Luckily things change and some entirely. Now working is meant to be enjoyed.

The well-being of the individual employee is a social objective, contributing to a thriving and successful society.

Grief guides us to reform and change the existing, anxiety hamstrings us and makes us play safe and avoid risks, while enthusiasm creates optimism – we believe in ourselves and our thoughts, and see more possibilities than threats. Emotions have a tremendous impact on our ability to see, think, and make decisions. The question is how to use them? How closely should we listen to our emotions in a challenging situation? Positivity brings tolerance, helps in framing problems, and gives us flexibility.

Negativity narrows and stiffens our thinking and reduces our willingness to take risks. But there is a need for both approaches in decision-making.

Stay away, I’m cranky today. But it has nothing to do with you, the project, or the customer. It actually has nothing to do with work at all.

But since I’m incapable of leaving the feeling at the office door, should I say something? Do we think like this? Does an increased understanding of one another add to our possibilities to perform better at work? A fight with my spouse, cranky kids in the morning, spilt my morning coffee on the way to work, a delivery truck reversed on my bike – would it help if you knew what was bugging me? Would we work together better?

88 • the holistic approach

Understanding one another better, and especially understanding the reasons for our behavior – whether it’s something that happened to me or whether it’s just the way I’m built – adds trust, and trust is a requirement of good collaboration. In true dialogue, when we really listen to one another we can enhance the quality of our decision-making.

What does this mean for decision-making? How do you feel about the decision? Do you trust the information? How do the risks make you feel? Are you ready to commit? One thing is to separate the emotions from decision-making that have nothing to do with it.

Being agitated about a personal investment going bad shouldn’t affect your recruitment decision at work.

It might in fact distract you from the relevant. When trying to understand the decision-making process, it pays to acknowledge emotions and the mood of the people involved. Moods can actually help determine the readiness for a decision to be made and executed.

The right timing is an important element of good decision-making.

Emotions often surface when facing difficult decisions. If you feel alone and the decision you were driving doesn’t go through, irritation usually hits. You might be really well prepared, with plenty of relevant information backing the proposal, and still your head isn’t clear. Maybe you become petrified, realizing you’re the only one supporting the decision. Obviously, none of us have a crystal ball with the correct answers. Despite thorough work, you just can’t seem to reach certainty. Fear is often a stronger motivator than opportunity. the holistic approach • 89

My organization had struggled with a big decision for months, a real hot potato. Everyone in management knew the decision had to be made, but at the beginning it was only referred to. No one really had the nerve to say anything. One day our CFO opened the game and said that in the current market we would not proceed with launching the new business. The rest of us were puzzled. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. We should have discussed it and somehow arrived at the conclusion together.

We knew our CFO as an influential guy and that the game was really already over. He justified his opinion by the loss of money and the huge risks involved.

Everyone was nodding, even quieter than before. I found myself very troubled, and even though the reasoning was solid my gut feeling and heart were telling me something different. At first unable to understand my own feelings, I suddenly spoke up in the meeting and told everyone of the strange uncertainty I was experiencing facing this decision. I was candid about not having the answers, but told them that missing out on a big opportunity was a stronger emotion for me than what the predicted risks posed.

Heads rose, confused glances; this was the first time I’d ever spoken about my feelings like this. After a few days, people came to me and complimented my stepping up, including our CFO. We started to really ponder our purpose and goals and actually found the strength to go ahead with the new business launch. How great it felt, everything suddenly being so clear. We haven’t regretted the decision.

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→ Quality – better

decision-making quality creates better results

Quality comes from effectiveness. You know the Japanese quality story?

At first, Japan had a widely held reputation for crappy exports and their goods were frowned upon by international markets – think about the image of Japanese cars in the 1970s. This led Japanese organizations to explore new ways of thinking about quality, and the new total quality approach was presented. Rather than relying on product inspection, manufacturers focused on improving all organizational processes through the eyes of the people who used them. As a result, Japan was able to produce higher-quality exports at lower prices, benefiting consumers throughout the world.

If you can measure it, you can improve it! Can you measure your decision-making quality? Our mind isn’t built to instinctively make high-quality decisions. Value ends up being routinely ignored. Decision-making that is merely “good enough” costs us more opportunity loss than we care to understand. But then again, do you know of an organization that would punish opportunity losses harder than real losses?

As decision makers, we leave tremendous value on the table because we believe we are making good decisions already.

– Carl Spetzler

Making good decisions in tight spots requires understanding the difference between decisions and the outcomes of decisions. Every decision, whether good or bad, can result in a good or bad outcome. However, a bad decision never turns into a good decision. The quality of a decision is determined at the time it is made; time and hindsight don’t change it. the holistic approach • 91

Good decisions, those made on the basis of good decision quality are likely to result in better outcomes. Decision quality is shown as a chain, because a decision is never better than its weakest link. The Stanford steps are excellent in their simplicity.

1. Right framing. Making sure you’re solving the right problem. Don’t plunge in before you’ve even defined the decision. Remember to involve the right people, align with vision statements, and get the purpose and scope defined.

2. Creative alternatives. A sure-fire way to add to value is to come up with better alternatives. Don’t stick to your comfort zone – remember that the best solutions might be found outside the box.

3. Gather meaningful and reliable information. For a choice to be trusted, it must be based on valid information, knowledge, and insight.

Remember also the uncertainty aspect of information – you need to be able to choose the best alternative.

4. Gain clarity around values and tradeoffs. You need to clearly know what is wanted. Determine your decision criteria and value creation.

When making tradeoffs between them, make sure they’re conscious.

5. Use sound reasoning. Evaluate what you are capable of in light of what you know and want and can do. Remember to address uncertainty and risks and don’t solely rely on emotions.

6. Commit to action. A decision means nothing without action, and it’s only as strong as its weakest link. Involve the right people in an effective and efficient decision process. Be ready to act and use the appropriate resources.

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6

COMMIT TO ACTION

5

SOUND REASONING

1

RIGHT FRAMING

Decision Quality

4

2

CREATIVE ALTERNATIVES

3

MEANINGFUL INFORMATION

GAIN CLARITY

the holistic approach • 93

Let’s assume you have two expert employees, and their only job is to choose and play a certain game. The games are heads or tails, and dice.

Heads or tails involves simply flipping a coin in the air and correctly predicting which side of the coin will lie face up. A correct guess wins you $10. In the dice game you win $5 by correctly guessing whether the throw will result in an even or odd number. Which game would you choose to play? Employee A chooses the heads or tails and employee B dice. At the end of the year you have to decide who will get a bonus payment.

Employee A hasn’t succeeded in winning at the game. B on the other hand has been successful and won the $5. Who do you think should be rewarded? Obviously the probability of winning at both games is 50%.

The coin flipping should be more lucrative, so employee A made a better decision and employee B won – but with an element of luck.

Our world usually rewards employees like B for a successful outcome.

This is wrong. We should pay more attention to the causation and value the quality of our decision-making, because it is the way to achieve better outcomes in the long run. Decision quality is the lifecycle, it is everything that happens in the decision-making process until the point at which we are aware of the outcome! It only (dispassionately) evaluates the way the decision has been reached. It very much resembles the scientific operating model and methodology.

How good was your decision? Most of us measure the quality of the decision-making process by the success of the outcome. When taking that stance, we never focus on how to build the best process ahead of time. We can do a post-mortem on a failed decision, but it will have little impact on our ability to plan a good process ahead of time. Decision quality should be something you can confidently defend even if the outcome was less than desired. In other words, you know you followed the best possible process even though the outcome was less than desired.

The outcome of a decision is the other component needed for triple-loop learning evaluation – was the effect and impact of the decision intended? Decisions often result in a lot of unintended side effects and 94 • the holistic approach

consequences, some positive and some very negative. Time changes outcomes; they look different at different times. We can really only evaluate outcomes in relation to the decision and its framing. When we as decision-makers have the guts to look honestly at ourselves in the mirror when facing the effectiveness of our decisions, we have the opportunity for real learning and to become an organization with a culture that supports triple-loop learning.

Let us return to the question of how to measure decisions. It’s good to evaluate decisions in retrospect, for example after six months. Consider these four elements: quality, velocity, outcome, and effort used.

Less time Score them on a scale from one to five. to in meetings give you a decision score. This four-element evaluation will take you maybe a minute or two. Have everyone involved in the decision do the same and you start to form insight. You will notice how differently you may see the elements. These are the crucially important moments for learning that can provide new understanding for your future navigation of decisions.

In an interview for strategy+business magazine, Daniel Kahneman said that when talking to business people in the context of decision analysis, he has been astonished by the fact that organizations that are making lots of decisions are not keeping track of them. They’re not trying to learn from their own mistakes; they’re not investing the smallest amount in trying to actually figure out what they’ve done wrong. This is the idea that you might want to appoint somebody to keep statistics on the decisions you made and a few years later evaluate the biases, the errors, the forecasts that went wrong, the factors that were misjudged, in order to make the process more rational – they just won’t do it.

Initially, the basic concept of quality in business was quality control – when an organization produced a commodity it was checked, compared

22%

the holistic approach • 95

with the specification, defective units were discarded and good ones delivered to the customer. From Japan we absorbed the radical idea of minimizing the probability of producing faulty commodities in the first place. This was done by focusing on improving processes.

Fingertip’s holistic decision-making lifecycle is based on exactly the same principle. Why settle on getting rid of bad decisions when we can focus on delivering good decisions. Fingertip is building a quality system for decision-making, with the simple goal that by making better decisions we can actually make the world a better place. Don’t confuse the quality system approach with stiffness. The whole point is to notice patterns, to find best practices that bring effectiveness, and to expose our decision-making to a system that helps produce good quality decisions while at the same time inspiring innovative and agile work. We’re aiming to provide the most inspiring environment possible for decision-making.

96 • the holistic approach

I had always considered myself a good recruiter: I was socially skilled and had a talent for reading and understanding people. I was complimented on my good abilities. I had raised several generations of experts and directors, successfully, I thought. However, at some point I started to evaluate my success rate. Multiple times in a row I had failed, and my inner circle started to criticize my decisions. Looking back at the decisions I had made and evaluating how I had reached them, I came to realize that I had lived under the illusion that I had a magic touch for making recruitment decisions. In reality I chose fun-looking people who told me a story I wanted to hear, ignoring feelings of uncertainty and the facts in front of me. I lost faith in my abilities as a decision-maker for a moment, but gained a new modesty that I have later on found to be an excellent asset in making decisions.

the holistic approach • 97

DRAFT

RECORD EVERY DECISION

HAVE CLEAR ACCOUNTABILITY

FIND THE RIGHT ROOT CAUSE

HOLD WELL PREPARED VIRTUAL MEETINGS

SHARE

PROPOSE

DECIDE

GET THE RIGHT INFORMATION

MAKE DECISIONS PROMPTLY

KEEP EVERYONE INFORMED

BUILD CONSENSUS

98 • the holistic approach

PLAN YOUR WORK

ENSURE REAL COMMITMENT AMONG STAKEHOLDERS

EXECUTE

IMPROVE BEST PRACTISES

LEARN BY QUESTIONING

EVALUATE

CLOSE

KEEP PROGRESS TRANSPARENT

TRIPLE LOOP LEARNING

REUSE DECISIONS WITH TEMPLATES

CAPTURE TACIT KNOWLEDGE

the holistic approach • 99

→ What are

the benefits?

Good decision-making is fundamental to the success of any organization, yet most companies use highly underdeveloped decision-making tools and methods. Meeting culture and minutes of meetings are typically ineffective, and organizations find themselves practically drowning in internal email. A significant proportion of decisions fail to be carried out for various reasons. Decision-centricity is an effective and fast way to improve productivity, achieve substantial cost savings, and prevent catastrophically misguided investments.

Capturing holistically the entire decision-making process, Fingertip takes the stakeholders through six detailed phases, beginning with the idea or problem through sharing, proposing, deciding, Time savings executing, and finally to evaluating the outcome. Uniting business and emotional intelligence with social networking to connect the right people and information and analysis tools is needed for effective decision-making. Combining an organization’s tacit knowledge with a holistic decision-making process and intuitive reasoning to create a transparent working environment creates huge opportunities for better insights and business understanding. Social decision-making facilitates employee empowerment, which in turn increases the significance of work and provides opportunities for influence, ultimately leading to greater organizational effectiveness and well-being. Approaching decision-making as the one thing that unites all work, understanding the comprehensive way that deciding is seen, actually links everything together!

Our solution is the first to turn decision-making into something that is quantifiable and manageable. It makes decision-making part of the organization’s quality system and fills the gap in decision management for the operational, tactical, and strategic decisions most often made by knowledge workers.

20%

100 • the holistic approach

Fingertip’s uniqueness is difficult to imitate, since it is the first holistic decision-making platform on the market. To our knowledge, it is also the world’s first quality system for decision-making. But like you’ve read throughout this book, Fingertip is not just an advanced enterprise app.

We take pride in the way we see the possibilities of better decision-making. We are keen to spread the ideology of social decision-making to all.

We are actually set on creating a decision-making revolution and are determined to bring caring about people and true leadership into the picture.

We are, in fact, creating a new standard for transparency in knowledge work by providing everyone with a view of each other’s workload and decisions – without compromising data security and confidentiality.

Can you honestly say you’re not curious? That you’re not wondering what it would be like to work in such an environment?

the holistic approach • 101

102 • the holistic approach

the holistic approach • 103

104 • social decision-making – true leadership and culture

5. True Leadership And Culture

social decision-making – true leadership and culture • 105

→ Decision-centric organizations

Now that you are, we hope, at least a little thrilled about decisions, a bit excited about the possibilities social decision-making could open up for your organization, and curious to learn more, it’s time to talk about leadership and culture.

Arguing that social decision-making leads to organizational productivity and well-being does place requirements on the organization.

Trust, openness, and sharing are needed. In order to raise productivity, the organization must learn to make the right decisions in the right way. When questioning is taken seriously and root causes sought, the decision-making process can lead to triple-loop learning and produce organizational learning and sustainable change. But this won’t happen by accident – you need to create a culture that encourages asking even the hard and uncomfortable questions, and really listening to one another, as well as respecting the diversity of opinions and insight, and honoring emotions. These are not just words, and they are not very easy changes for an organization to make. You have to make a habit of stripping down a little and sharing your ideas, showing your team members the workload you are struggling with and also the issues you are uncertain about. The good news is that we can all help each other. Cheering, praising, contributing, sharing, giving feedback, and teaching all increase motivation and lead to better work well-being.

Social control, accountability, and transparency are also necessary because they guard us from the corruptive nature of power. Social control can be a positive force. When we know how and with what reasoning decisions are made, trusting and committing to the consequences becomes easier. Clearly defined accountability and responsibilities contribute to commitment. What is expected of me? What role do I have in this? What has been assigned to someone else to execute? Does someone have the final say or the right to veto? Transparency can help solve a lot of issues.

The Ford Model T was the first car manufactured using the assembly line process. It was revolutionary in many ways. Henry Ford’s work in using and streamlining the assembly line showed us how powerful it 106 • true leadership and culture

Create a strong Social Decision-Making culture

1 2 3

Encourage people to share ideas, problems, emotional intelligence

Make sure employees know their suggestions will be taken seriously by peers and superiors.

Build brainswarming into each decision

Solicit feedback from group members at key decision points to ensure vital information is never overlooked.

Log important communication & collaborate Document plans and key discussions to eliminate the “he said/she said” nature of spontaneous conversation.

true leadership and culture • 107

could be in mass production. How about applying the same idea to decisions? Is your decision-making continuously stuttering because of missing information, people, the difficulty of gathering the decision-makers for a meeting, unclear responsibilities, or poor documentation? How about streamlining your decisions to improve the velocity and speed of your organization? Giving decision-making a process of efficiency and an inspiring environment can be just what is needed to make decisions flow and prevent unnecessary disconnect. Focusing on the decision-making lifecycle can raise an organization to new heights.

Decision and outcome quality is the way to holistically improve efficiency. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. It is an old management adage, was it Deming or Drucker who said it, or actually neither? It doesn’t really matter because it is still accurate today. Unless you measure something, you don’t know if it is getting better or worse. How do you manage the improvement of something if you don’t know which way it is developing? So, you can only manage what you can measure. When decisions have a tremendous impact on our businesses and lives, shouldn’t we find out what the quality of our decision-making is?

The main purpose of a knowledge worker is to produce decisions for the customer. That is Fingertip’s thesis. A person who spends roughly 40% of their working hours gathering information is very well educated and experienced, has expertise, and thinks for a living. Can you think of a more productive use for this time than providing the organization’s decision-making process with insight and understanding?

108 • true leadership and culture

Create a strong Social Decision-Making culture

4 5 6

Assign roles & adjust group sizes

Keep decision groups large enough to avoid tunnel vision but small enough to preserve a close-knit dynamics where everyone knows each other. Ensure everybody knows what’s expected from them.

Resist the urge to direct

If you are the boss, allow employees to contribute and tackle problems on their own before immediately jumping in with a solution.

Your people become empowered and passionate about their work once they have a say, feel the meaning and engage.

Nurture, reuse, relate, and summarize decisions

No decision is born alone. Record and complete activities in decisions, reuse beneficial decisions as templates and create connections to related decisions. Finally group related decisions in plans.

true leadership and culture • 109

After reading this guide, hopefully you now understand why Fingertip is built on the values of: Sharing Accountability Transparency Reciprocity, and ...the belief that people will do their best when given a true chance.

What we are really talking about here is leadership and culture. We are not stopping at management; we want to make leadership more decision-oriented. We want to make workplaces more transparent and trustworthy towards decision-making. We want an attitude shift. We want sharing to be in our DNA. We want reciprocity to be an obvious, basic assumption in business. How do we get there? How do we create a culture that will encourage and allow us to invest in decision-making as the uniting element of our organization?

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. We have all made significant investments in refining our strategies. Do you know and understand your strategy inside out? Can your employees relate to it? More importantly, can they articulate it? If not, how will you be able to execute it? In order for strategies to succeed they must become part of our everyday decisions and actions. However, while many studies show there is a direct correlation between a healthy, productive culture and a company’s bottom line, the majority of companies fail to act on this.

Organizational culture, the personality of an organization, is the behavior of its people. It is how we think and act at work. Culture refers to the beliefs, ideologies, principles, and values that the individuals in an organization share. It is how we teach new team members to perceive, think, and feel at work. Organizational culture affects the way we interact with each other and with our stakeholders.

110 • true leadership and culture

Create a strong Social Decision-Making culture

7 8 9

Timing is everything

After reasonable incubation of the problem or idea at hand it is time to set timing for the progress of the decision-making. The timetable creates the necessary sense of urgency among the stakeholders.

Honor diversity of opinions

Decide how to decide. Remember that your organizational culture and your own attitude decides how openly people want to express their opinions and on the other hand are ready to get influenced.

Evaluate & Learn

The only way to learn from poor decisions is to evaluate them and detect the places where you have errors in understanding and find new routes to overcome them in the future.

true leadership and culture • 111

Culture also determines what kind of decision-makers we are. Fingertip is a tool, a service, a platform, a process, an ideology, but mainly an environment for delivering better decisions. Most of what you’ve read in this book is something you can adapt to your decision-making regardless of whether you use Fingertip or not. Much of it has a lot to do with culture, attitudes, and habit. To find something new we need scouts, we need followers, and we need leaders.

One guy with a crazy idea. You need the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. Keeping your message simple and clear, so that it’s easy enough to follow. The first follower has a crucial role, he publicly shows everyone how to do it. You as a leader should embrace him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore, it’s about them, plural. The follower calls his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader.

The second follower is a turning point because three is a crowd and a crowd is news. Good ideas need followers to become news and to turn into habits and culture.

Turns out ants aren’t clever little engineers, hunters, or warriors after all; when it comes to deciding what to do next, most ants don’t have a clue. Ants aren’t smart, ant colonies are. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They have swarm intelligence. It’s the collective behavior of a decentralized and self-organized system. This has been applied to leading people. The leader of a swarm leads by inspiration and example, setting the vision and goals for the organization while building a culture that empowers members of the swarm to act.

112 • true leadership and culture

Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher that lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.

– John C. Maxwell

Leading people and managing is about enabling. Making sure your people have the possibility to make the very best decisions they can and to do their very best work. That is what a decision-centric organization aims at. But not everything can be taken down to the grass roots. Some situations require autocratic leadership and decision-making. It is usually best in crisis situations when decisions need to be made quickly without consulting a large group. Strong leadership is good in stressful situations, because it allows people to focus on doing their job without worrying about making complex decisions.

Today’s environment values speed and the ability to adapt and lead in uncertain situations. At the same time, the flattening of organizations has created an explosion in demand for leadership skills at every level.

How do we rise to this challenge?

true leadership and culture • 113

→ The Fingertip

Leadership Principles

1. Base your management decisions on long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

Let’s start with the hardest part. Does your organization have a longterm philosophy? What are your goals for the next five years? Are you struggling with everyday battles? If you’re in business with the intention to last, maybe you should take a step back and think how you’re going to accomplish your goals. Long-term plans are slow to implement, but their purpose is to create a foundation for long-term growth and sustainability. At times, that means doing so at the expense of a short-term win.

An ambitious start-up turns down too tight investment funding and quick wins in pursuit of a bigger dream. Staying true to the firm’s own values and beliefs and refusing funding that would have required changing the vision puts the company in a tight spot financially for a while. However, they kept the opportunity for success in their own hands and decisions.

2. Create a culture encouraging bringing problems, ideas, and worries to the surface while acknowledging emotions.

Trust and openness are necessary for us to feel safe enough to open our mouths. With the fear of being criticized, punished, or even fired, who wants to share information? How will you ever know what the silent introvert is thinking if the overall attitude isn’t in favor of speaking up? How do you treat the person delivering bad information? Would you shoot the messenger?

When pointing out a problem or a worry always means also having to deal with the issue yourself, you can expect important ideas to stop surfacing pretty quickly. You need to create a culture where the one finding a flaw will be thanked, otherwise you will miss out on the possibilities that problems, failures, and mistakes provide for learning and development.

114 • true leadership and culture

“Blame is not for failure, but for failing to help or asking for help.”

– Jørgen Vig Knudstorp

3. Level out the workload by transparency, accountability, and reciprocity.

Every workplace has the problem of unequal division of workload. We perform differently, our abilities can vary, and personal situations can affect our effectiveness. If one individual is accomplishing 80% of everything, what the heck are the rest doing? How do we level out the workload? We’re willing to do charity work in our free time, so why not at work? A transparent workbench provides the boss with an understanding of what’s going on. Leveling out the workload is a management issue, but it also makes it possible for co-workers to help each other out.

You’ve got a lot on your hands so let me help you out! “I’ll scratch your back” includes the idea of you scratching mine.

4. Use the decision-making lifecycle as the basis for continuous learning, improvement, and employee empowerment.

We want to be part of building better businesses and better workplaces.

Development and success require learning. Use the opportunities to learn what decision-making offers to you. Evaluate what you do and how you do it. Evaluate the outcomes, question your assumptions, and be honest about the findings. Seeking improvement isn’t necessarily pleasant, but then again growing seldom is. However, learning brings satisfaction, and the empowerment that comes with it can be addictive in a positive way.

Aim to take advantage of all learning opportunities and celebrate the small wins – the jobs well done and the bad screw-ups all result in learning. true leadership and culture • 115

5. Visualize objectives and use compelling scoreboards to ensure no problems remain hidden, managing the workflow and focusing on the wildly important.

Make sure your people know how they are performing and what the work done is resulting in. Provide as much information as possible to ensure that everyone knows where the goal is, what their role is in the game, and how they can help the team to win. Understand that the feeling of control and the ability to focus on the essential encourage commitment.

6. Grow leaders who understand what your people do, stimulate collaboration, and reinforce integrators.

We all seek recognition, so give it to your people. Understand what the work is, how it is done, and what it takes. Make sure the leaders you grow absorb this and use every opportunity to enforce collaboration. The age of bosses who don’t know, understand, or care for the work their people are doing is long gone.

“The most effective form of leadership is supportive. It is collaborative. It is never assigning a task, role, or function to another that we ourselves would not be willing to perform. For all practical purposes, leading well is as simple as remembering to remain others-centered instead of self-centered.”

– Brig. Gen. John E. Michel

116 • true leadership and culture

7. Develop into a decision-centric organization: collaborate, create a cadence of accountability, respect people and their expertise, and reward cooperation.

Better business comes from better decisions. Tap your decision-making resources, and make use of the element that connects all work together.

You can’t do strategy without input from sales. The disconnect between strategy and sales is costly and dangerous. R&D needs to work together with marketing, and customer insight is invaluable for successful R&D. To have the right skills, HR should be included in the strategy. You can turn it any way you like, but the fact is that in the current age, economy, and markets nothing can flourish in silos.

Cooperation and collaboration is a must. Decision-centricity is what gives your organization the framework for uniting the different operations together and making the best use of your decision-making capital. Build an organization where decisions are made as close to work as possible, by those with the most insight and who are actually affected by the outcomes.

8. Aim for passion through meaning, engagement, and influence!

Make it your personal goal to build a business where individuals and teams experience passion for their work. Work should have meaning.

Whether it is working towards world peace or providing a livelihood for the community, a sense of purpose is important. Give your people the opportunity to influence. Let them get their hands dirty in the work and engage with one another. At the end of the day, even the numbers will thank you.

true leadership and culture • 117

Leadership principles

1

Base your management decisions on long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

2

Create a culture encouraging bringing problems, ideas, and worries to the surface while acknowledging emotions.

3

Level out the workload by transparency, accountability, and reciprocity.

4

Use the decision-making lifecycle as the basis for continuous learning, improvement, and employee empowerment.

118 • true leadership and culture

5

Visualize objectives and use compelling scoreboards to ensure no problems remain hidden, managing the workflow and focusing on the wildly important.

6

Grow leaders who understand what your people do, stimulate collaboration, and reinforce integrators.

7

Develop into a decision-centric organization: collaborate, create a cadence of accountability, respect people and their expertise, and reward cooperation.

8

Aim for passion through meaning, engagement, and influence!

true leadership and culture • 119

120 • social decision-making – takeaways

6. Takeaways

social decision-making – takeaways • 121

FOUNDATION WE ARE ALL DECISION-MAKERS DECISION-MAKING IS A NECESSITY DECISION-MAKING IS HARD ORGANIZATIONS LIVE OR DIE BY THE DECISIONS THEY MAKE DECISION-MAKING IS THE CORE OF ORGANIZATIONAL SUCCESS

122 • takeaways

DECISIONS ARE THE SMALLEST COMMON DENOMINATOR OF ALL BUSINESS OUR MAIN OBJECTIVE AS KNOWLEDGE WORKERS IS TO PRODUCE DECISIONS (FOR OUR CUSTOMERS)

DECISION-MAKING REPRESENTS THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY TO IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY AND WORK SATISFACTION IN KNOWLEDGE WORK

DRAFT SENSE OF URGENCY SHARE

START & END

PROPOSE TIMING FOR DIFFERENT PHASES

DECIDE EXECUTE EVALUATE

DECISION AS A TRANSPARENT PROJECT

CLOSE

LIFECYCLE

HOLISTIC APPROACH

& SS CE CT LY O PR ROJE OUS P ANE T UL M I S

METHODOLOGY

DESIGNATED RESOURCES WITH ASSIGNED ROLES

DEFINED GOALS, RISKS & APPROVALS

TASKS, ACTIVITIES & EVENTS

takeaways • 123

HANDS-ON FEEDBACK SHARING LOOK FOR STIMULI & TRENDS

OPENNESS

SHARING ACCOUNTABILITY

CULTURE AT TI TU DE

TRANSPARENCY RECIPROCITY

S UE L VA

PEOPLE WILL DO THEIR BEST

RECORD ALL DECISIONS POST SPONTANEOSLY

BIT HA PRAISE YOUR PEERS

CLOSE OLD WORK TO MAKE ROOM FOR NEW

CHAOTIC

G KIN A M NY SIO URIT I C DE MAT

REPEATABLE

DEFINED

124 • takeaways

MANAGED

SOCIAL

BE AWARE

AIM PAS FOR SIO N

WATCH OUT FOR:

DEV DEC ELOP INT ISI ORG ON-CE O A N ANI ZAT TRIC ION

BIAS RUSHED CONCLUSIONS

GROW LE ADE UNDERST RS WHO AND W PEOPLE D HAT O

VOCAL MINORITIES LACK OF RESPONSE

VISUALIZE AND USE SCOREBOARD S

GROUPTHINK

USE DECISIO NMAKING LIFE CYCLE

LEVEL O UT WORKLO AD BRING P EMOTI ROBLEMS, IDEAS ONS T & O THE SURFA CE

LONG PHILO TERM SOPH Y

LEADERSHIP

takeaways • 125

ENGAGEMENT

INFORMATION

SHARING

COLLABORATION

GRADIENT OF AGREEMENT CE EN U L INF

VOTE

COMMITMENT

APPROVAL EMOTIONS

COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE

MOOD

WIKI

TECHNIQ UES

BRAINSWARMING ASK THE 5 WHYS

MULTIVOTING

PROBLEM SOLVING ENSURE YOU REACHED THE ROOT CAUSE

COLLABORATION

IDEA CREATION

WEIGHING OPTIONS BY COMPARING CRITERIA

ONLY 1

DECISION MATRIX BACKUP

ACCOUNTABILITY ONLY 1

CAN MOVE DECISION FORWARD

126 • takeaways

VETO

RESPONSIBLE

CI RA

ACCOUNTABLE CONSULTED

INFORMED

ACTIVITY

CONTRIBUTION

INFLUENCE & IMPACT OF STAKEHOLDERS

DURATION

DECISION QUALITY

WAS IT A GOOD DECISION?

CLASSIFICATION

OUTCOME QUALITY

QUALITATIVE QUANTITATIVE

OUTCOME EVALUATION

MEAS UREM ENT QUALITY MANAGEME NT SYSTEM

DECISION SCORE

QUALITY

CONTROL ASSURANCE

AUDIT TRAIL

QUALITY ESSENTIAL

TURN INTO BEST PRACTISES

DETECT ERROR IN PREMISE & FIND NEW ROUTE

3RD LOOP 2ND LOOP

DETECT ERROR IN UNDERSTANDING, INFO OR PROCESS

1ST LOOP EVALUATION TRIPLE LOOP LEARNING

DETECT UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

URGENT VS IMPOR TANT

RELEVA NCE & SOCIAL ACTIVIT Y WILDLY IMP DECISIO ORTANT NS (WID ) ACT O N

LEAD MEAS URES

KEEP A CO SCOR MPELLING EBOA RD

CADEN CE OF ACCO UNTA BILITY

takeaways • 127

LEARNING

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