A few weeks ago some new friends asked me to collaborate with them on an opportunity that had come their way. As I dug into what they had in mind, I quickly realized that the opportunity they thought they had before them wasn’t what it seemed. Not only was it not designed for them or companies in their position, it would most certainly have a negative return on investment. As these were new friends and I didn’t yet have much experience engaging with them, I paused for a moment to think through how to best give them counsel so they could make an effective, informed decision. I determined then to operate consistently with a framework that we adopted at Recursion many years ago, which seems to me should be used more broadly in the world. So I did, to both the benefit of my relationship with them and the benefit of their company.
Origin
I believe it was the fall of 2018 at a senior leadership offsite at Recursion (~15-20 most senior leaders of the company) where we took some time to decide upon some “operating norms” for that leadership group. The idea was to develop a handful of principles we could abide by together that would help us increase our effectiveness as leaders and trust amongst ourselves.
To be honest, I can only positively remember 2 of the 6 we came up with (I think I can recall a third, but I’m not 100% confident it’s right). I’d wager most people present there would be in a similar boat. It’s much easier to come up with and agree upon some pithy statements than it is to reduce them to practice. But one of them stuck with me and several others, and while it took some time to really get it ingrained, I believe it was a game changer for me and in some ways, Recursion. It pertained to how we would make decisions as a leadership group and as a company, which was becoming increasingly difficult as the company rapidly grew.
The “operating norm” or principle was simply Debate – Decide – Communicate – Support (or DDCS, for short). I don’t recall who came up with the phrase (was it Kristen? Tim?), but it was sticky and the phrase didn’t go away. It did take some time to figure out what exactly it meant and how to reduce it to practice, but the next summer, we really started to hone it effectively. And so, after years of operating this way at Recursion and finding myself still using it today, I feel it’s worth sharing this framework with anyone interested, so you can learn how to engage with each other on difficult topics and decisions in a way that will on average yield better decision outcomes and stronger bonds of trust.
On Decisions
But first, a general word or two on decisions themselves. Making decisions is possibly the most important thing anyone or any group does. Doing or accomplishing anything is predicated on first having made a decision “to do” something. We often make plenty of decisions by default – living and operating unintentionally takes less upfront energy, and so it’s easy to slip into this habit, but there are consequences to being acted upon by the world around you, rather than acting upon the world yourself. Every one of us is an agent with the ability to make choices, and when we abdicate that responsibility to others, we often end up somewhere we never intended and full of dissatisfaction.
Companies, organizations or teams that do this fare no better than individuals. There are many decisions that can significantly alter a company’s trajectory, and so intentionality is critical. Sometimes in the quest to be flexible, or just to survive, a company will abdicate its decision making right to others. For example, by not being intentional and clear about its culture and including this in the hiring process, a company may unintentionally bring on individuals that will shape the culture in a different direction. Alternatively, aiming to be as flexible as possible in order to secure a major client or partnership the company may give up its ability to develop its own platform or technology because its vision and objectives are now dominated by that major partner. So even though this isn’t strictly a part of the decision making framework I’ll walk through today, overarching it all is the concept of intentional decision making.
Three Frameworks for Making Decisions
Smaller organizations can make intentional decisions more easily than larger ones, and the model they often resort to is one of Decision by Consensus. This is not a bad thing in a small organization. At that stage, there may only be a few people who even need to be involved in any given decision, and it’s often not too difficult to create full alignment and consensus amongst 2-3 people. And when decisions are made by consensus, execution is naturally easy – everyone is “on board” so to speak, and people can get right to work. I’d wager that one reason why (in my experience) the per capita value created by early stage startups far exceeds that of larger, mature organizations is largely driven by the ability to quickly make decisions and start acting upon them.
As an organization grows, consensus-based decision making becomes much more challenging. The nature of the decisions facing the organization often evolves in such a way that more input, more perspectives are really needed to make an informed, effective decision. More cooks in the kitchen leads to more disagreements, and a difficult time finding a solution that everyone agrees with. Now let me be clear, these disagreements can still be cordial – this doesn’t mean that everyone involved devolves into a jerk. It just means that different people see things from different angles, and so have different opinions on what should be decided upon. And herein lies a problem leading to a failed decision making framework: if you’ve got a bunch of good people with strongly differing opinions, you’ll likely still strive for consensus and fail to achieve it, again and again and again. I call this framework Debate – Debate – Debate – Fail To Get To Consensus – Punt (or DDDFGCP for short – just kidding, I hate acronyms). Teams will spend hours, days or weeks debating some issue, striving for consensus and never achieving it, but unwilling to make a decision that their peers or colleagues can align upon (remember, they’re all nice people and like each other) they punt the decision. And then the cycle resumes. This is the worst trap to get caught in, but as you can imagine it happens easily in a growing organization. Why is this so bad? Because it leads to an unintentional decision to not decide, which is a decision itself.
One of my favorite quotes pertaining to this comes from Andy Grove’s book Only the Paranoid Survive (isn’t that an awesome title?):
Most companies don’t die because they are wrong; they die because they don’t commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.
Andy Grove
“The greatest danger is standing still” – but that’s exactly what happens when teams strive to get to consensus when consensus is an unreasonable expectation. And this often happens when teams lack three things: a willing leader, collective courage and an alternative decision making framework. I can’t necessarily give you the first two, but hopefully I can give you the third.
This is where Debate – Decide – Communicate – Support comes in. This framework provides an alternative approach to making decisions that doesn’t rely on consensus, but doesn’t become dictatorial in nature either. Let’s break it down.
Debate
Any good decision must be well informed. This is where the Debate phase comes into play. In this phase, everyone involved (who should actually have an informed perspective on the decision at hand) should share their perspectives in a radically candid way. Some may call it a “no holds barred” scenario, but that doesn’t mean those involved can be jerks. But every opinion should be heard and that should be a clear expectation given to those invited to be part of the debate. There is no room for quiet disagreement or dissent. To pull this off, a team often needs a few things in place:
Quick alignment on who should actually be the decision maker (Single! One person!)
This can happen either just before the Debate phase, or near the beginning. And to be clear, the single decision maker need not be the person with highest authority in the room. That person (highest authority) is accountable that the decision is made, but that doesn’t mean they make all of the decisions. Sometimes someone will raise their hand and say “I think I should be the decision maker on this because… (e.g. I will be most affected by the outcome, or I have the most experience in this domain, or something else)”, and then the highest authority person can quickly say “Yes, you’re it!”. Other times (often in the case of a humble group of brilliant people) the highest authority will have to just make this precursory decision themselves. And sometimes they’ll select themselves to be the decision maker (there are lots of scenarios where this is good and some where this is not so good – if it’s always themselves or never themselves, you’ve got a leadership problem).
Designated time for the debate
Maybe this is a live meeting. Or maybe it’s an asynchronous debate over Slack. Either way, make it clear that you are in the debate phase and how long you expect the debate phase to last. This sets some expectations of how long until a decision will be made.
Clarity on who is in the debate
Not everyone needs to be involved in every debate (don’t make this mistake). Whoever the highest authority person is, they should identify the minimal set of people needed for the debate, and explicitly invite them. It can be helpful if you segment the types of decisions such that there are fairly unchanging leadership teams or “debaters” for each decision segment.
A courageous disagreement
Sometimes, even when the expectations are clear that this is time for real, meaty debate, folks will hold back. If you are the highest authority person in the room, ask someone that you know likely has a contrary opinion ahead of time if they will please share their contrary perspective in the meeting. Doing this shows that person that you value their perspectives, and then when others see the disagreement, it makes it a safer place to share their own.
In-meeting invitations
You don’t have to be the highest authority person to improve the debate quality. Listen to who is sharing perspectives and who is not. Pay attention to their body language. You can often recognize when somebody is being quiet but might have something to say. Invite them. Say, “Frank, we haven’t heard much from you on this topic, but I imagine you’ve got a pretty good informed opinion. What do you think?” Unless you have a pretty broken team in terms of trust to begin with, most people will engage at this point.
The important thing here is to make sure that perspectives are heard and the decision maker is well informed.
Decide
The second step is often a bit more solitary than any of the others. In this step, the single designated decision maker must actually make a decision. This decision must be clear. There is little room for waffling here, or trying to appease all the perspectives. Doing so will create a muddled decision that others won’t be able to understand. Be decisive (it’s a decision after all!).
Decisions should be time boxed. If you have taken the time to have a meaningful debate, don’t waste that effort by still punting on the decision. Giving yourselves a clear deadline can be just what you need to ensure a decision actually gets made.
The decision maker should weigh the inputs from the various debaters, and at least mentally weight them based on their “believability”. Ray Dalio goes much further on this, with a more algorithmic approach called “Believability Weighted Decision Making” (see this article, or better yet, go read his book Principles). You don’t need to go full algorithmic here, but at least consider the believability (in terms of experience, judgment, etc.) of each of the debaters relative to the decision topic at hand. This practice will help the decision maker in their process.
An important part of this step is to not just be explicit about what you will do as a result of the decision, but also what you will not do. Take a look at the etymology of the word “decide”:
It literally means to “cut off”, if you go back to the Latin roots. Same origin as the word “homicide”. Any effective decision also clearly articulates what you will not do – what will be “cut off” – amongst the alternatives. Framing it this way also makes it clear that those alternatives were considered, which helps others understand the nature of the debate (and be more confident the debate actually happened).
Once you’ve made the clear decision, your work is not done, but you are ready to move on to the next phase.
Communicate
I believe deeply in the value of written communication. While verbal communication is so useful (we use it more than any other form), when it comes to decision making, you want to have a degree of decision provenance. You won’t have that unless you record the decision, and written records tend to be the most discoverable.
Be clear, yet concise in the actual decision language (e.g. “We have decided that we will do X.”). Then clearly include your why behind that decision (this can be less pithy, and should contain as much explanation and extrapolation as needed for others to see the logic behind the decision). Include what you decided not to do (and your reasons why).
Once you have this written decision record, share it as broadly as possible. Make it transparent so that as many people as possible can access and read it, even if the decision is not directly relevant to them. Doing so helps build confidence in the leadership in your organization. Obviously don’t share it broadly if it pertains to information that truly should not be known by most of your employees (e.g. “We have decided that now is the time to take our company public”) at least not until a more appropriate time. But I have noticed that organizations tend to be less transparent than they can be or need to be, and that is often to the detriment of the company’s broader operations. If you want to get crazy with transparency, you can go the Ray Dalio/Bridgewater way of Radical Transparency, record every meeting and make those meeting records fully accessible (to be clear, I am not paid in any way to advocate for Dalio’s methods, but I do think there are some compelling gems amongst his principles).
Support
This is possibly the hardest and most courage-requiring element of this framework. When a decision is made, you support it. Period. No undermining. No holding out hope that disaster will strike so you can say “I told you so”. No standing on the sidelines to see how things play out. None of that.
Support means you throw your whole weight behind the decision, even if you disagreed with it during the debate phase. Why do this? Because you believe that being an effective team is more important than being right. Because you believe that this process will yield more effective decisions on average, and that is more important than any one decision. Because you trust your colleague who made the decision heard you, understands your perspective, but is likely seeing something you’re missing.
There were many times on Recursion’s executive team where we would have fierce debates, where I would vehemently disagree with the decision maker’s perspective, but then once the decision was made and done, I would fully throw my support behind it. One time Chris asked me to be the one to go and execute and manage a plan that I had strongly opposed, and I did – I did it to the very best of my abilities! This isn’t being two-faced or flip-flopping – it’s being a team.
A couple quick tips here to help with this:
- When you voice an unpopular opinion during the Debate phase, make it clear that no matter the decision, you are going to fully support it and get behind it as best you can. Doing so helps others see effective debate behavior, and increases their confidence that you are there for the team and the overall success of the company.
- If you feel a decision is so abhorrent that you just cannot stand it, make that clear, kindly. Don’t use this as an ultimatum, but just be clear where your personal, ethical or moral boundaries lie. And be ready to follow through. You’re not doing this to force somebody’s hand or manipulate the outcome. You are simply helping others transparently see a second-order consequence (more on these a different time) of the decision (your departure), so they can weigh that into the decision. And if they move ahead, then quietly and simply depart.
- Keep your debate where the debate should happen. If you have loudly and vocally shared your thoughts and opinions on a decision among people who are not necessary to the debate/decision, then you’re setting yourself up for a struggle later on should the decision go a different way. Again, this isn’t being sneaky or anything. It’s simply making sure that debates happen with the right people so that you can go and fully execute on a decision regardless of your opinions/beliefs. It’s a way to avoid undermining yourself.
Final Thoughts
The above framework is a powerful tool to improve a company’s (or an individual’s!) decision making. If you use it, you can free yourself from the quagmire of endless debate with no decisions and you can maintain your momentum, and momentum is key. But that brings up a critical, final point:
Don’t let the framework become your new obstacle
If you apply this framework to every single decision you have to make, either as an individual, a team or a company, you will lose your decision making momentum. Overuse can be as disastrous as underuse. As with all tools or frameworks, be wise and pragmatic about how and when to use them. In short, be intentional about using this framework to make decisions.
I wish you the very best in your quest to improve your organization’s ability to make effective decisions, and I hope that this walkthrough of this powerful framework will be helpful to many!