Decisions That Last

The moment that a startup first gains traction is exciting. Suddenly, you’ve uncovered the segment people that are enthusiastic about your product. However, this is often followed with rapidly expanding the size of your organization. How do you continue to move forward when everyone isn’t in the room and doesn’t have context on decisions?

The Pitch

Decision Arrow is my analytical framework that emphasizes thinking deeply about the input factors and encourages transparent decision making. The goal is to make decisions durably by avoiding idiosyncratic or subjective decision making. It also has the flexibility to remain valuable when there are changes to the input factors and possible solutions.

The framework is best in areas where a decision has multiple objective inputs, solutions and the potential for state change. I’ve found that the tool has limited value for subjective or static decisions.

Why now?

It’s natural for high-growth companies to double their employee population each year. Therefore, we should assume that nearly everyone that will live with the impact of our decisions aren’t existing customers or employees. It takes 10 minutes to write up a Decision Arrow today that will save potentially hundreds of hours in future onboarding.

Beyond people, each decision made at a startup, by defintion, had a disproportionate impact on the business and product. Therefore, we risk more with fast and instinctive thinking.

Decision Arrow is my prophylaxis against the decisions that churn:

• “Qi told us that X was the best solution. They no longer work here though.”
• “We didn’t think about solving the problem that way.”
• “We made this decision to increase X but didn’t realize that Y also matters.”
• “Kwame had an idea for X but I can’t find the email or Slack message”

How does it work?

We assume that a durable decision is a case where we would select the same solution given an identical state of the world. That is, an “arrow” that maps between the problem and solution spaces, given the state of inputs.

Here’s the four step process for making a Decision Arrow:

1. DEFINE THE PROBLEM SPACE

• Where do we need to make a decision?
• Why does it matter?
• Optional: How easy is it change course?

2. UNCOVER INPUT FACTORS

• What variables matter(include target outcomes and costs)?
• What would change our decision in the future?
• Optional: Link to previous decisions that produced any inputs

3. EXPLORE ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

• List out all possible solutions — don’t stop after your favorite choice!
• Include solutions that optimize for single input factor.

4. SELECT THE BEST SOLUTION

• For each solution, how well does it cover our inputs?
• Identify the best path forward and document.

How do you use it?

I have a template Decision Arrow document with sections for: Problem, Inputs, Possible Solutions and Decision. When a major decision point arises, I take 10mins, with stakeholders, and create a new decision arrow. Often times, just the first step can help align decision makers becuase they are forced to verbalise the specific problem being solved.

The result is that the team has clear documentation to revisit previous decisions and a structure for indentifying if a decision should to change. Best of all, as your company grows new team members can quick gain context and enter the decision making process.

Originally published on Medium.