📘 Communication starts before a decision is made

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In case you missed it, last week we talked about decision quality and how ‘bikeshedding’ inhibits our ability to prioritize and focus on what matters.

This week:

• 📣 Upskilling team decision making: Communication

• 🫣 Bias 4/50: False Consensus

• 🪦 Gary Klein’s Pre-mortem

Upskilling team decision making: Communication

Over the past two weeks, we’ve covered decision making speed and quality - this week, we’ll take a look at something that feels intuitive, but often overlooked - communicating decision making

What does a well-communicated decision look like? What does it even mean to ‘communicate’ decisions?

These feel like they should be easy questions to answer. We’re constantly communicating decisions in some way - otherwise nothing would get done. We currently think about this in two groups; the activities and processes before a decision is made (that is often overlooked), and those after a decision is made.

• Pre-decision: Communicating ‘how we decide’ to build buy-in. This is all the work to build ‘shared cognition’ across the team in alignment to strategy and goals.

• Post-decision: Communicating to inform or incite action/change. This is what we might typically think of as decision communication, alerting others that a decision has been made and dealing with the fallout.

Being explicit and systematic about how we decide builds the scaffolding that frames strategy - ultimately cultivating buy-in, alignment, and agency to keep moving forward.

“Strategy is a decision making model that we share within the team - and within that team, we're trying to get people making similar tradeoff decisions all the way from very high level decisions to very low level ones…

…It’s about making hard decisions easier for everyone else” - Chris Butler, Lead Product Manager at Google, Strategy is now

In the name of brevity, we won’t cover post-decision communication in this post, but not due to laziness. We believe the pre-decision activities have a tremendous impact on improving what we’d typically experience post-decision.

Ideally, the work that we do pre-decision shows the context around how we decide, who was involved, what information was available, and which points of view were represented.

Communicating ‘how we decide’ to build buy-in

We see the phrase ‘disagree and commit’ (made popular by Amazon’s leadership principles) too often used as a scapegoat for not putting in the effort to productively disagree. This is not the intent of the principle, but unfortunately it can be interpreted as an excuse to ignore dissenting opinions.

Decision making does not correlate to popularity. A good decision is often not a popular decision, but a decision without commitment, especially from those who dissent, may not be a good decision.

Making unpopular decisions without buy-in isn’t just unpleasant, it’s bad. It breaks culture.

Coming back to the phrase ‘productively disagree’, an effective decision architecture makes the way we decide explicit - and can therefore be scrutinized out in the open. This means that building that commitment with dissenters is a pre-decision activity.

We can disagree when we don’t get what we want, but still respect the rigor of the system.

This is additive to some of the communication/alignment models already in use at high-performing organizations today - Google’s OKRs, Amazon’s 6-pager, Salesforce’s V2MOM, etc…

These models, in essence, create guardrails for decision making.

Every team, company, and individual is already operating with some kind of decision making model, it’s just implicit. Unfortunately, this implicit model can lead to the scrutinizing of individuals that dissenters believe ‘didn’t listen’ or ‘don’t understand’, and perpetuates the fear of making consequential decisions.

Creating a decision log to share, learn, and iterate

Making this process explicit is an important, impactful step towards building the capability to learn from decisions. We can only learn from what we can observe.

Yet, we don’t see many teams documenting decisions. Research suggests many of these benefits rely on structured decision documentation (or decision logs) to revisit, evaluate, and update our models based on the outcomes we observe.

We think this will change as more teams operate in fully async or hybrid workflows - and as more techniques are available to pull decisions from unstructured data.

“Whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally…

The key to doing this is that it prevents something called hindsight bias, which is no matter what happens in the world, we tend to look back on our decision-making process, and we tilt it in a way that looks more favorable to us… So we have a bias to explain what has happened.” - Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate

Bias 4/50: False Consensus

As we talk about decision communication, it may seem obvious that we’d want to effectively communicate decisions, but we tend to overestimate how much everyone else is ‘on the same page’.

For this reason, we tend to lean on post-decision communication over pre-decision communication.

The false consensus effect is a cognitive bias that occurs when we overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

This bias is particularly prevalent in group decision-making contexts, where individuals may assume that their own opinions are more widely held than they actually are.

One of the key drivers of false consensus is the human tendency to rely on our own experiences and perspectives when making judgments about the world around us. When we are faced with a decision, we tend to assume that others will see things in the same way that we do, and that our own opinions are therefore likely to be representative of the group as a whole.

The problem with this assumption is that it can lead to a lack of diversity in group decision-making. When individuals believe that their own opinions are widely shared, they are less likely to consider alternative perspectives or to seek out dissenting voices. This can result in group decisions that are overly homogenous and that fail to take into account the full range of possible viewpoints.

In long-standing teams (like leadership teams), false consensus can lead to group polarization, where the opinions of individuals within a group become more extreme over time.

This occurs because individuals with similar beliefs tend to reinforce each other's views, while dissenting voices are marginalized. This can lead to group decisions that are more extreme and less nuanced than they would be if a more diverse range of perspectives were taken into account.

Gary Klein’s Pre-Mortem

Developed by Gary Klein, the pre-mortem analysis is a tool intended to increase the probability of a project’s success. It is based on ‘prospective hindsight’ – imagining that the project has already failed and then generating plausible reasons for its demise. This is to identify potential risks at the outset, rather than utilizing a post-mortem and waiting until the project has already failed to evaluate it.

In 1989, researchers at Wharton, University of Colorado, and Cornell observed the phenomena known as ‘prospective hindsight’ in a study aptly named ‘Back to the future’. Their research suggested that this method of mentally transporting to the future increased the ability to accurately forecast risks by 30%.

There is some psychological trickery here. When we think about future situations, we’re able to look at scenarios from a more objective, outside-view perspective. This is because our present self views our future self as a stranger. Research shows that a different part of our brain is activated when thinking about the future, the same part of our brain that activates when we think of strangers.

This may work in our advantage for a pre-mortem, but present bias (or ‘future discounting’) contributes to our inability to save money for retirement or sacrifice short-term rewards for long-term gains.

Facilitating a pre-mortem

The goal of a pre-mortem is to transport the team to a future situation in which we made the wrong decision(s) and fail. This give the team the psychological safety to think negatively about the future situation and incentivize ‘nay saying’

Here is a step-by-step guide to conducting an effective pre-mortem:

1. Brief the team: Before beginning the pre-mortem, it is important to give the team a general overview of the decision, the context, and goals.

2. Assume the decision was wrong and produced a negative outcome: It is important to explain to the team that the pre-mortem should not be a normal critiquing session. Instead, it should operate on the assumption that the decision was wrong and throughout the discussion, no one will argue object to any of the reasons given for failure.

3. Have each team member generate reasons on their own: After the team has been briefed on the plan, each team member should independently generate reasons that the decision ended up producing a negative outcome and why (see the nominal group technique for generating ideas in groups). This can include potential risks that may have been overlooked.

4. Ask each team members to read their reasons aloud: As the team reads their reasons aloud, record them on sticky notes. Remember, there should be no objections or discussion on the reasons, just sharing. This can also be done async via a survey.

5. Group feedback and review the list: After all the reasons are captured, review the list and clarify anything the group has questions on. With larger groups, it’s often beneficial to group similar reasons into themes.

6. Assign probabilities to the potential outcomes: This is an optional step that helps build an outcome tree for the decision making process. The team can run a mini-Delphi to forecast the probabilities of the negative outcomes.

7. Evaluate the results: To strengthen confidence in the decision, identify potential risks that need a mitigation plan or new assumptions that need to be tested.

Communicating the pre-mortem

Take the time to summarize the pre-mortem to share with the broader team and document it alongside the decision. When the team revisits decisions, this is an important artifact to combat hindsight bias. When looking back at decisions, we tend to think the outcome was inevitable or obvious, even if at the time we might have given the outcome a low probability.

This exercise also builds confidence in teams to combat zero-risk bias and take on more aggressive decisions. When the team feels like risks and potential failure points were exhausted, it’s easier to get buy-in for a high-risk, high-reward decision.

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