Background on Tough Decisions

In any organization progress can be stymied by unresolved issues.  It’s counterproductive to keep rehashing the same question from week to week, perhaps making a decision today only to have it reconsidered and undone tomorrow.  An organization needs both a reliable method for making good decisions and the willpower to stand by them once made.

Milt Hess’s paper, Decisions – It’s a Tradeoff, offers a repeatable method for making good decisions even in the presence of ambiguity.  (Sorry, but no help here with the willpower thing.)  It includes techniques for identifying the best options and the relevant evaluation criteria, and for objectively characterizing the options in terms of the criteria.  Since a decision almost always represents a tradeoff among competing objectives, the emphasis is on presenting the decision-maker with the basis for making a decision that reflects his or her priorities.

Key elements of the approach

• When evaluating the options, avoid vague terms like Excellent/Good/Fair/Poor. They’re subject to variable interpretations.  Instead, treat each criterion as a continuum from best to worst, and select four points along the continuum that can be described unambiguously.

Continue reading How to make good decisions even in the face of unresolved issues. →

Terms commonly used in strategy setting and business planing mean different things to different people. A crisp common definition of key terms makes it easier for a leadership team to create and communicate organization in strategy setting and business planning. Assuming everyone has the same definition in mind leads to confusion…it is better to be explicit.

The following definitions have served many organizations well:

PURPOSE: Why the organization exists; lasts as long as the organization is around.

VISION: How leaders plan for the organization to be some time, generally years, in the future. Often best expressed in terms of where the organization was in the past, where it is now, and where it is headed. Updated annually but does not change radically except in extreme circumstances.

MISSION or BIG (Hairy-Audacious) GOAL: What the organization aims to accomplish by when; lasts until accomplished or until it no longer makes sense relative to other options; at which point it is replaced with a new one. Continue reading How to synchronize the language leaders use in strategy setting and business planning. →

Any organization that performs and grows, exists to solve a problem in organization for a customer.  Its mission explains why it exists and its vision explains where it is headed but neither, individually or together, necessarily explains the solution (WHAT) it provides customers (WHO) and the problem their solution solves (WHY) for those customers.

While it may at first seem simple or obvious, it is usually surprisingly difficult for leaders to sort out and agree on how to describe all three dimensions. Employee surveys invariably reveal that the most urgent need across the organization is to get a better handle on: “Who are we and what do we do?” which reveals the importance of clearly and consistently communicating all three dimensions to everyone in the organization. Continue reading How leaders can get clear about whose problem their organization solves. →