Reviewing decisions
Posted on January 17th, 2010 by Paul McArdle – No CommentsThe following is my paraphrase of Scott Berkun’s list of questions to ask when reviewing the effectiveness of past decisions. Scott’s points have been taken from (p7172-173) his book “Making things Happen”, which has been separately reviewed.
I have translated them to a more general context, and more specific to our situation, in order that we can refer to them more often in future…
Q1) Did the decision resolve the core issue?
If not, we will need to ascertain if the decision was the wrong one, OR if the implementation of the decision was just poor.
Q2) Was there better logic or information that could have make the decision better?
In Scott’s book his focus is on making the decision quicker – for us, there could be many different aspects of “better”.
Q3) Was the higher level context available, and did it help in making the decision?
Scott talks about his documents (i.e. Vision, Specification, Requirements). In more general terms, the question is about whether This is one thing I have learnt from Shirlaws as a result of their coaching of me about the 3rd core responsibility of the CEO (i.e. coaching about context).
Q4) Were the right people involved in the decision?
Clear enough?
Q5) In hindsight, did you focus on the right things in making the decision?
Was your own sense of intuition finely-tuned enough that you understood where the areas of biggest leverage were?
Q6) Did you have sufficient authority to make the call?
Did you have the authority (or not)? Did you know that you had the authority (or not)? Did others know that you had the authority (or not)?
Q7) How can these Learnings be applied elsewhere?
Then apply them!