RAPID is a thoughtful and constructive process, but it’s not meant for every problem. The process naturally lends itself to more complex issues that require a lot of stakeholder input. Here are some of my favorite decision-making frameworks.
Use this framework (stands for “driver, approver, contributor, informed”) to make effective and efficient group decisions. We hope this post would have guided you in understanding what decision frameworks are comprehensively, so before we end, we’d like to hear your Decision-Making Framework definition in the comments. To reach a level of experience where you are confident enough to make the right decisions, a decision-making framework will always be of assistance.
But if they’re too low, you’re leaving money on the table. Closing out our example, the decision maker would likely be from a different team (not software) so they could review all relevant data objectively before deciding whether to create the new software. Note that the decider does not need to be in leadership. In fact, it’s helpful to assign someone who’s not a team lead or company executive to the decide role to reduce bias in your decision-making. The decide role is the person who makes the final decision. In order to make a high-quality decision, they should understand all sides of the story, any trade-offs, and know the impacts that the decision will have on everyone involved.
The Journey from Project-Centric to Product-Centric
Another nice thing about this specific framework, is that you can add sections to it. Besides the three listed above, you can also include others like risks or legal concerns. Whatever is the most important to your business – work it into the framework.
- Making decisions under pressure and with limited information can cause a bad decision to look like the right thing to do.
- Sometimes, this leads to hard decisions where less rational, but much easier, decisions could be chosen.
- Have you ever thought about applying those ideas to your life?
Someone in the company might turn out to have a much bigger say in the decision while someone else just needs to be informed about the final choice. Using a RACI model is extremely useful in bigger companies but that’s not to say it shouldn’t be used in small startups. The sooner you take action and make RACI a part of your process, the less work it will take to implement in the future. If you make it a part of your company’s culture from the very beginning, you will have much less trouble making decisions when your business grows bigger. For each option being considered, you’ll want to call out the pluses and minuses of each choice, as well as any potential risks or trade-offs that come with it.
RACI Decisions
Imagining that the decision you are taking is a failure and asking yourself why it was a failure is an excellent way to work backward. This third or new idea is a unique combination of the best parts of the original, opposing ideas. Decision making framework Here is where the decision-making framework comes into application. In this example you are required to ask yourself the following questions. The journey from a project-centric to product-centric organization is an important one.
- If you don’t have the kind of expertise that is sorely needed to use this model effectively, go with a different decision making framework.
- Having a specific decision-making criteria is also the best way to ensure everyone’s decisions within the company actually align with the company’s short and long-term goals.
- Group decision-making is a must when dealing with sensitive topics or subjects that a lot of people have an interest in.
- It can really dishearten your employees and might lower their quality of work.
- Then you should input the names of the team members responsible for the decisions in this category.
Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean it will continue to work for everyone in perpetuity. Now, it probably goes without saying that this model won’t work for every situation. If your team is dealing with a complex problem they’ve never faced before, using the intuitive decision making model is a big mistake.
Decision making models to guide your team
Only by careful exploration of the problem, aided by the insights and different perspectives of others, can we make good ethical choices in such situations. Ethics is sometimes conflated or confused with other ways of making choices, including religion, law or morality. Many religions promote ethical decision-making but do not always address the full range of ethical choices that we face. Religions may also advocate or prohibit certain behaviors which may not be considered the proper domain of ethics, such as dietary restrictions or sexual behaviors. A good system of law should be ethical, but the law establishes precedent in trying to dictate universal guidelines, and is thus not able to respond to individual contexts. Law may have a difficult time designing or enforcing standards in some important areas, and may be slow to address new problems.
We hope they’ll help take the dread out of decision-making and lend you clarity on choices that can drive your startup forward. With the game of roulette, we know all the potential future states and the probability distribution. We know that it’s always a losing game because the house takes a cut and because of the numbers 0 and 00.
This means there’s no mystery about who should be doing what. This is not a magical guide to decision-making, but a simple toolkit from which you can pull out different frameworks. Ideally, these tools are woven into your company culture, and become daily, weekly, and monthly knee-jerk reactions to some of the questions that inevitably come along. Next, I investigate how the subject or idea fits in terms of my principles. These principles act as the operating system for decision making. Because while mental models help with comprehension, principles guide behavior.
Addicted gamblers are influenced by a bunch of factors that feed their addiction. Some of these are the gambler’s fallacy, envy, culture, and social proof. We recommend you read the entire framework online, then download or fork your own copy.
The benefits of a defined, scalable, decision-making process
For example, the ethical corporate action, then, is the one that produces the greatest good and does the least harm for all who are affected—customers, employees, shareholders, the community, and the environment. Cost/benefit analysis is another consequentialist approach. Obviously, this framework is useful in situations that ask what sort of person one should be. As a way of making sense of the world, it allows for a wide range of behaviors to be called ethical, as there might be many different types of good character and many paths to developing it. Under Informed, include anyone affected by the decision who isn’t directly involved in making the decision. These are people and teams who may need to change their work as a result of the decision made and will need to know the outcome.
The number of people involved in your RAPID will vary as well. On smaller teams, the same person might hold more than one role. In larger organizations, there might be a full tiger team for one role. This may sound confusing, but it’s extremely important to understand the decision you’re about to make. We’re very used to thinking about decisions as just a choice to make. But you should understand that there’s more to each decision you come to.
With this more nuanced input, the person or group can tally up the responses and make the final decision, weighting each opinion appropriately. This process moves beyond an up/downvote and lets you sense what kind of ongoing support a choice will really have if it’s selected. As teams and companies grow, silos form, and different groups start doing things their own way.
Eisenhower matrix
“Once you do a quick assessment of the importance of your choice and start using the decision-making framework over and over, something happens. In that time, you can quickly make a high-quality choice with this framework,” says Rajaram. There’s an art to knowing when to end debate and make a decision. Many leaders are reluctant to make the final call when there are good arguments and a lot of emotions on both sides. We intuitively want the team to come to the right decision on their own. But I’ve found that people are enormously relieved when they hear that you’re grabbing the baton and accepting responsibility for a decision.
The main Goal of the Subject is to spend a weekend in LA with a friend (shown in blue). As for the Benefits (light green), we listed affordability, schedule flexibility, comfort, flexible navigation in LA, and minimal travel time. We also mentioned that it’s hard to navigate in LA without a car as a Risk (yellow) and that driving that far is tiring – Domain knowledge (purple). This decision-making framework is based on a 4-step process of multi-context analysis.
For example, some people spend more time researching their next car than checking out their investment options in their retirement plans. Not to mention trying to understand the investments they make themselves. And some people spend days finding just the right refrigerator but are willing to put half their life savings into a stock tip they heard from a friend. Did one decision making model lead to a more satisfying decision for your team, management, and customers? Plan out a schedule to review your decisions on a regular basis.
Because founders Larry and Sergey were (and are) very strong-minded leaders involved in every major decision, Eric knew he couldn’t make huge unilateral choices. This could have stalled a lot of things, but Eric made sure that decisions were made on a specific timeframe — a realistic one — but a firm one. He made this a habit for himself and it made a world of difference for Google. In this roundup, we’ve gathered six time-tested tools, frameworks and principles for making high-quality decisions at fast-moving startups. They include strategies for distilling the information needed to make a decision, testing potential solutions and reconciling clashing perspectives.
And if everyone’s blood is always up, it’s going to result in frequent conflicts. The downside is this model isn’t excellent for large teams and organizations, as there are simply too many people to consider. The questions also lack precision, so it may be tough to apply them to every situation. The intuitive decision making model encourages you to go with your gut and follow your instincts. While that may sound like a haphazard way to approach an important decision, your brain is trained to rapidly recognize patterns. The rational decision making model minimizes risk and uncertainty by ensuring your team methodically works through the decision in a specific sequence of events.
Open decision making is an approach to arriving at actionable agreements through participatory practices. While surrendering complete control can be a challenge for some leaders, micromanagement will lead to a hostile work environment. Qualified adults don’t need someone breathing down their necks 24/7. Putting clear principles and best practices in place will ensure everyone is on the same page, and it makes it easy to get new hires up to speed.