Deciding to Change: Choosing

When organizations decide to do something different from what they've been doing, the changes they undertake might involve changing more than what they do. Sometimes they must also restructure the way they make decisions. For example, the relative importance of software engineers and actuaries in insurance companies has changed significantly in the past 50 years. Although software engineering is more important today in such organizations than it once was, one can debate whether the political power of the people engaged in software engineering today parallels the importance of their profession in executing the mission of the organization.

Elective change in organizations sometimes exposes conflicts of interest between the interests of the organization and the interests of the people who must make the decision to change. In some cases, this conflict of interest is resolved not in the favor of the organization, but in favor of the personal interests of the decision makers. When that happens, the organization remains stuck on paths that lead to stagnation, contraction, and — possibly — bankruptcy.

What can we do about this? Here are four suggestions for enhancing decision quality.

Recusal

A pattern of participation in decisions that affect the personal interests of the decision makers is a performance issue. In politics and jurisprudence, excusing oneself from such participation is called recusal. The practice is rare even there, but with the exception of certain professional standards, it's almost totally absent from organizational life. Would not organizations that succeed in incorporating recusal into their decision processes gain significant advantages in decision quality?

Inclusion

The dual of recusal is inclusion. In most organizations, the same group of decision makers makes all the big decisions. From time to time, they do seek advice from specialists, but the specialists' role is advisory only — they rarely have decision authority. Are there not classes of decisions that would be improved by including some people who are customarily excluded from decision making?

Decision process risk management

Even among A pattern of participation in
decisions that affect the
personal interests of the
decision makers is
a performance issueorganizations that recognize the importance of risk management, risk management practice tends to emphasize what the organizations does, rather than how the organization makes decisions. Certainly all organizations make bad decisions once in a while. Can we not use risk management principles to protect ourselves from these mistakes?

Retrospectives

Most important, perhaps, is a practice often called "lessons learned," or retrospectives. Retrospectives help us avoid repeating our own mistakes — or the mistakes of others. Although widely used in the lower reaches of the org chart, they are much less common at high levels. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that requiring self-examination of others is easier than asking it of oneself?

Which of these practices do you recognize in the decision-making process of your own organization? Which are absent from it? First in this series   Top    Next Issue

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More articles on Organizational Change:

Change How You Change

In the past two years, your life has probably changed. Do you commute over the same route you did two years ago? Same transportation? Same job? Same company? Same industry? Change is all around, and you're probably pretty skilled at it. You can become even more skilled if you change how you change.

The Restructuring-Fear Cycle: I

When enterprises restructure, reorganize, downsize, outsource, spin off, relocate, lay off, or make other adjustments, they usually focus on financial health. Often ignored is the fear these changes create in the minds of employees. Sadly, that fear can lead to the need for further restructuring.

Deciding to Change: Trusting

When organizations change by choice, people who are included in the decision process understand the issues. Whether they agree with the decision or not, they participate in the decision in some way. But not everyone is included in the process. What about those who are excluded?

Motivation and the Reification Error

We commit the reification error when we assume, incorrectly, that we can treat abstract constructs as if they were real objects. It's a common error when we try to motivate people.

Way Over Their Heads

For organizations in crisis, some but not all their people understand the situation. Toxic conflict can erupt between those who grasp the problem's severity and those who don't. Trying to resolve the conflict by educating one's opponents rarely works. There are alternatives.

See also Organizational Change and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.

Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

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And on May 22: Rescheduling Collaborative Work

Rescheduling is what we do when the schedule we have now is so desperately unachievable that we must let go of it because when we look at it we can no longer decide whether to laugh or cry. The fear is that the new schedule might come to the same end. Available here and by RSS on May 22.

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