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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Related articles
More articles on Organizational Change:
- Don't Rebuild the Chrysler Building
- When we undertake change, we're usually surprised at the effort and cost required. Much of this effort
and cost is necessary because of the nature of the processes we're changing. What can we do differently
to make change easier in the future?
- Workplace Taboos and Change
- In the workplace, some things can't be discussed — they are taboo. When we're aware of taboos,
we can choose when to obey them, and when to be more flexible. When we're unaware of them, they can
limit our ability to change.
- On Beginnings
- A new year has begun, and I'm contemplating beginnings. Beginnings can inspire, and sometimes lead to
letdown when our hopes or expectations aren't met. How can we handle beginnings more powerfully?
- The True Costs of Cost-Cutting
- The metaphor "trimming the fat" rests on the belief that some parts of the organization are
expendable, and we can remove them with little impact on the remainder. Ah, if only things actually
worked that way...
- How to Find Lessons to Learn
- When we conduct Lessons Learned sessions, how can we ensure that we find all the important lessons to
be learned? Here's one method.
See also Organizational Change and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
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- And on March 27: Allocating Action Items
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