Decide differently

At a funeral services provider, many authorities were given to the professionals in the teams. In addition, the decision-making process for decisions requiring a management team was significantly shortened. Instead of the management team meeting once every two weeks, a decision was made  to have a daily call of fifteen minutes in the morning to make quick decisions. The condition was that no long documents would be prepared. Instead, the management team used a scrum board with actions and decisions discussed during the morning call. This way, the management team kept an overview of ongoing issues. If you wanted to present something to the management team, you simply discussed it with a manager. They then brought it up in the call the next morning. In most cases, there was enough information, and a decision could be made immediately. If information was missing, it didn’t matter. You didn’t have to wait two weeks to get it back on the agenda but could discuss it directly with a manager, who would bring the information the next morning. An additional advantage was that what was discussed the day before was still top of mind for the other members of the management team, and the addition could be quickly discussed. This new way of making decisions significantly shortened the turnaround time. Much time was saved by writing and reading fewer documents, and decisions were made quicker.

Which decision-making process in your organization would benefit from shortening? With whom could you shorten this decision-making process? And how can you get those involved to experiment with the shortened decision-making process?