Improve your decision making process (5 steps)

2 min readApr 20, 2020

Your team’s decision making process should never end in a deadlock. If it does, it’s probably a sign that your team can’t work well together.

Picture this:

you need to make a decision, well and fast.
you bring in your best people to give input and help you out,
instead of working together to find the best option, they all just bring and defend their own point of view and don’t let go
you end up stuck in the middle of the decision making process with nowhere to go
on top, you may be working remotely — which does NOT help when not everyone sees eye-to-eye.

If you’ve been anywhere near this situation, you know how hard it is find a way out, and not surprisingly, the best way to avoid a deadlock, is to not give it any chance in the first place.

Here is how.

The RAPID decision making process

Anytime you need to take a strategic decision for which you can’t afford endless arguments, you need to divide your team in 5 smaller groups, each one with a clear function.

Each group can play that one role however they want, but they are not allowed to ever interfere into what another group is doing.

Group tasks

1 — Recommend

Group one, recommend, need to come up with one or more proposals for the decision. To build these proposals they need to gather information, they can do so as they want, and if they think they need a hand, they can involve group two, the ones that provide input.

2 — Input

This group only reacts when prompted. Their job is only to provide what is asked as precisely and as timely as they can to group one, the ones that recommend.

Once group one is done and their proposals are ready, they bring them to group three — the ones that agree.