The Point of Decision

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I have been in my role for over two years now and I am still adapting my learned behaviors to my organization. This is particularly true where it comes to decision-making. In part, that’s because I went from an executive role to one where I’m a middle manager in the hierarchy. Overall, the process works the same but I find I have to emphasize different parts of the process. It can take more time than you might imagine to recalibrate.

My decision-making approach is, allowed enough time, pretty consistent. Obviously, if you have to make a quick decision, you make it with the best information you have. From that perspective, I feel comfortable about making immediate decisions. There are also times when someone is looking for a particular decision and it’s not yet the right time to make a decision, one way or another. I try to make it clear in those cases that I will make a decision but I’m waiting for X or Y to happen to provide more context for whether a decision needs to be made. A poorly made decision does not necessarily improve clarity or autonomy for anyone.

Reactive Decision-Making

This is particularly true when something goes wrong but it’s a singular event. You can end up creating new policies and making decisions about an anomaly. The uniqueness of the situation means that you start to create a whole set of incremental policies for each aberration that comes along. If there is an obvious fix that improves a resource or service for everyone, then that’s an easy change to make. There’s no need to wait in that instance. However, if it’s a negative (but not dangerous) issue, I may wait for it to recur before trying to contain what may be a one-off with specific deterrent action.

The difficult part, I find, is that you need to try to solve the problem, not the particular situation that has arisen. Those are not always the same thing. For example, someone may complain about not having access to the law library (“why isn’t the library open and staffed 24 hours?”). In those cases, is the issue really physical access or is it access to materials or people? Is this a problem for that one person or are they representative of a larger problem?

Sometimes you can make that one change that solves a problem for many people even though only one person has made the issue known. Evening book circulation is a good example. Or ensuring that the person knows about remotely accessible resources (or licensing resources in order to meet that need). Sometimes you just need to wait and see; make a note of the issue and see if it recurs.

In those situations the decision-making is different from customer service. You absolutely want to be responsive to that individual incident, whatever it was. You may only be able to let the person know you understand that it was an issue for them, even if you have no way to resolve it. That sort of feedback is a data point for a future decision and doesn’t itself necessarily require a decision (to keep things the way they are despite the issue, or to change to resolve the issue).

Even when it comes to reactive decision-making, though, I tend to follow a bit of a process:

Socialize Possible Outcomes.

This starts with socializing outcomes and raising the issue or idea in need of a decision or action. In a reactive situation, this usually happens for you; someone brings an issue to your attention. I will tend to ask people with knowledge or expertise what they think about the issue: how might they have handled this before or at a different organization? What information isn’t captured in the complaint or suggestion that would help us to know how to react?

It is common to work at an organization where some staff have been there more or all of their career, spanning decades. It is common to learn that what you are considering has already been attempted and failed or otherwise been discarded as an idea. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt your resolution. Ask why it was stopped when challenge with “we have already tried that.” Sometimes timing and resources have changed enough that something an organization should be able to accomplish can in fact now be accomplished.

Often, I will pitch a possible solution to provide something to react to. I am not necessarily that invested in my own idea but it helps to move from the abstract to the specific. As I talk about below, this can be tricky. You do not want to suggest a singular solution or be directive when you are still gathering information. As a leader, you need to build up that organizational muscle so that people will give you feedback and not think, “well, that decision has already been made.” If the only time you pitch ideas is when you have already made a decision, you may find that the response you get is only reactive, not collaborative. Problems that you might have been able to anticipate become unexpected obstacles because you didn’t ask.

I try to set that example by being open about walking back my own idea or discarding it. In many cases, I will pitch an idea I haven’t developed much myself. It should have holes in it, to allow other folks to poke at it and possibly fill those gaps. It may still be something worth developing but if you bring a fully-baked idea to a brainstorm, you’re missing out on the value of the discussion and shared expertise. People will try to make your idea work, rather than coming up with the best idea.

Socialize Solutions

Once you have an idea of what you are going to do, you still have work to communicate it. This can be a difficult step and more so when you are within a hierarchy where both service delivery and oversight overlap with your own areas of responsibility. We may think that we are making a decision just for our team but in reality it can cause ripples well beyond us.

At our law school, there are at least two departments who have created their own miniature book collections. They source their own materials and most are not in our catalog and may or may not have an inventory management aspect. There may be a possibility of collaborating—could we buy the book inventory for them and manage it through the catalog, or shift our deselected items to them to create a refresh path for their collections—but mostly it’s just good to know they exist.

There are areas where there is more overlap. If you share resources, like underwriting an event with another department, then decisions relating to your budget have downstream impacts. Perhaps the most obvious in a law library is paying for information access. When we dropped Bloomberg Law, even though I had enough data to feel confident in making the decision without additional input, it went through a socialization process.

This involved letting people higher in the hierarchy know that I was planning to follow this path. I did that so that no one was surprised. If you are not in the C-suite yourself, people may raise your decision (or the hint of it) with people who are. In my experience, the better prepared those people are to support you, the more likely they will. Also, if they know that a decision or change won’t fly organizationally, you can get that information up front and decide what to do with it.

Only then did I check with the people (faculty) who would notice the change most closely. If it was not going to move forward there is no need to rile people up about it. The first group was a faculty library committee, which would give me a chance to gauge what the possible reaction would be. Once I had that feedback, I was ready to broaden my approach.

I had to laugh as I was reading “Whatever it is, I’m against it” by Brian Rosenberg.

I have omitted the carefully worded letter because (a) it was long and (b) it doesn’t really matter what it said. There is no issue that can be phrased carefully enough to fully defuse negative reactions.

This pre-work cannot be skipped. I cannot count the meetings I’ve attended where someone presented an idea and it immediately went sideways. You need to make sure you are talking to the people who might have their oxen gored or who will give you feedback, even if it is negative. This is not just a political exercise.

This is especially true at governance meetings, whether they are for boards or faculty assemblies. The point of the committee process is for the committee to hash out a solution. That is not work to be done at the governance level. But there is often a missing step: the committee chair and members need to speak to constituents: members of the board, fellow faculty. They need to identify resistance and opportunities to improve the solution before they reach the board meeting or faculty assembly. The pre-work for this sort of action requires political acumen to know when or if to bring a potential decision forward.

You should never walk into a meeting where you are going to deliver a decision without knowing that you have done this work. If you are ever taken aback by a negative reaction, it is often because you didn’t do enough early outreach. I think people skip this stage (again, see below) because they don’t want to increase a negative reaction. There are workplace cultures that the raising of any possible solution creates people who will say, literally, “I will fight that.” But, putting aside the negative aspect, having these early conversations can help refine an idea to make the final decision more acceptable.

Communicate the Decision

By the time you make a decision, if you have done the socializing and earlier discussions, most people will know what’s coming. The decision itself may not be received well but it will not be a surprise. The goal of the decision-making process isn’t to get everyone to agree with you. At the same time, you should have a good sense of how it will impact everyone.

At this point, I start to communicate how that impact will occur. Is it a single event: X will happen on Y day? Is it a process or a project? Who has to be involved? Who will be communicating what and to whom and when? A law library director in Toronto once described how she always writes up a list of “people who need to know” when she’s making a key communication. You really can’t be too inclusive in this list.

However, I will say that how you communicate will still impact the success of the decision’s outcomes. I rarely use a CC (and never a BCC) on an email communication that requires transparency. Some people use the CC to bring in someone’s boss or superior; I find that changes the way the communication is received. Instead of communicating something that can be collaborative, now it’s become directive. Similarly, not everyone needs the same message. One thing I do rely on though is email; that way, everyone who is involved sees the same thing that everyone else sees. The overall messaging is consistent and everyone knows that everyone else is getting the same information.

Proactive Decision-Making

I find reactive decision-making simpler than driving an idea that doesn’t seem to have any starting point outside of myself. A lot of the pre-work with a reactive decision is done for you. You may need to wait a bit but you have data that helps you define the issue. This is not the case when you want to make a decision but it is one you are initiating.

The process is the same. The biggest challenge is the pre-work to communicate what the issue is and to identify possible issues a particular approach might raise. Some of this relates to context and some if it relates to culture. The latter is harder to overcome.

Context is usually easier. It requires a relatively methodical approach to finding out who else might be impacted by a decision. I once attended a discussion where the group was asked to identify possible stakeholders. By the end of the process, the stakeholder list included literally everyone (internal constituents, governance members, and “the public”). That’s unmanageable and, frankly usually incorrect.

Stakeholder identification is one way to do it but it’s not always conclusive. If I cancel a book title, I can anticipate how it will impact people who rely on it. What about law firms who rely on access to the book but aren’t part of my organization? What about the entity, internal or external, that could extend the life of that discarded book? It is important to distinguish people who will be impacted from those to whom you owe a specific obligation.

It is one reason I miss usage data in the law school library. Without it, I have to rely on uncertain tools like faculty or student surveys. I have to rely on anecdotes, and people who say, “well, I don’t use that but X or Y might” and then talking to X and Y and finding that, indeed, they do not but Z and A might, and so on. Decision-making is possible without data but the lack creates a huge blindspot.

I find this stage a bit like legal research. Eventually, you will have tapped enough brains other than your own or monitored enough processes to have some confidence about what direction to go. You’ll have uncovered the overlaps.

The cultural part of this is much harder. Not everyone is comfortable with open ended ideation. More than once, I have reached out to someone with a fact-finding question, something I didn’t know where to start on, only to have them respond defensively and cc’ing a bunch of other people. Their goal was not to impart information or provide guidance so much as to attempt to drive a stake in the idea. The carbon copies to other members of the hierarchy was to shoot up flares and, potentially, to encourage others to also put a hold on any forward movement.

When people reach out to me with an idea, I will tend to respond only to them. I may suggest they talk to other folks who I know will be interested, but I am (overly?) sensitive to the fact that this isn’t how everyone gathers facts. If the cultural response is to immediately escalate by broadening the group at the very earliest stages, it suggests that the culture isn’t very open to change.

The funny thing is that this can reinforce people not seeking advice or information before making a decision. If the organizational response is to try to stop a change as soon as it is proposed, it may make more sense for the decision-maker who is creating something new to just act. I don’t like the phrase that it is better to seek forgiveness than permission but I think that is the way some organizations operate. Sadly, I have found that it makes cross-organizational collaboration nearly impossible. Since no one benefits from proactively sharing an idea, each idea comes as a surprise to the rest of the organization.

At some point, you will cross the point where the new idea is now well-enough discussed or understood as when an issue is brought to your attention. You can now proceed back again through the communication process. Hopefully, those people you spoke to at the beginning can help to champion or identify other people who should be involved in the discussions. Really, the more the merrier so long as that inclusion doesn’t come at the expense of making a decision.

I will tend to set a deadline for feedback; if people don’t respond by that time, I move ahead. I do not follow up to nag them; I am dealing with adults and professionals and I respect that not everyone needs to be involved in every decision. Also, most decisions can be adapted in the future; late feedback can feed that next cycle just as actual feedback to the change will help to improve outcomes.

Looking back, I can deploy most of my learned experience without thinking about it. I am still learning personalities and who is open to new ideas and who may need more preparation. The thing I need to keep in mind is that, no matter how many decisions someone makes, they can’t be complacent about airing the idea before it becomes a decision.