Decision Making at All Time Low
In a 2021 post, Lead Generation- When Nothing Works, I bemoaned the inability for marketers to find messages and mediums that resonated. I wrote,
"It is clear that buyers are tuning out traditionally effective marketing methods and buyers are being saturated by marketers all singing off the same hymnal.
Given the immense cost of both product led and traditional sales led strategies, the question of how to drive leads is of critical importance. While I doubt there are silver bullets, the weapons metaphor is apt, as just firing more bullets also seems not to be working.
Now three years later, I continue to see the challenge in lead generation but am noticing another pernicious business dynamic that is stifling progress and driving frustration, the inability to make a decision.
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Be it the pandemic, hybrid return to work where no day sees a quorum, the low energy, low intensity Zoom discussions that meander with no agenda or outcome, matrixed organizational structures where no one is in charge, I see decision after decision stuck in death by a thousand cuts, murder by committee, etc.
The shift to hybrid return-to-work models, where employees split their time between remote and in-office work, presents a unique set of challenges for organizational decision-making. With team members dispersed across various locations, synchronizing schedules and ensuring effective communication becomes increasingly difficult.
Matrix organizations, characterized by overlapping lines of authority and multiple reporting structures, add another layer of complexity to decision-making processes. In such environments, decision-making authority is often distributed across different departments or functional areas, leading to ambiguity and potential conflicts of interest. Balancing the needs and priorities of various stakeholders within a matrix organization requires a high degree of coordination and collaboration. Given the hybrid work dynamic, the pitfalls of matrix organizations with respect to decision making, coordination, and collaboration makes a bad problem a terrible one.
Furthermore, the sheer number of people involved in decision-making processes can hinder agility and responsiveness. As organizations grow larger and more diverse, decision-making can become bogged down by bureaucratic processes, red tape, and competing interests. In such environments, achieving consensus or even obtaining timely input from all relevant parties can be a formidable challenge.
I recently heard of a project at a Fortune 50 company that required presentations to 70 different teams to secure "buy in."
It feels like bureaucracy is winning and we are losing as a result. What to do? One simple question is to examine how many people have to approve X before it can happen? How many meetings need to occur before X is approved? Where are the bottlenecks, legal, procurement, cyber reviews, etc, so many places where there is no benefit to saying yes and lots of downside if something goes wrong?
Time is the enemy of startups, each day cash is consumed against a race to build value, reduce risk, and drive results. The fundamentally broken culture of no decisions is insidious and seems to me to worse now than I can remember.
Anyone else seeing the same dynamic at play and are there any lessons to learn from those who have streamlined decision making to increase cadence, progress, and action?
Great observation. Unsettled dust is in the air, and for so many reasons. The AI age springing forward in hitherto inknown ways is among them, but also concerning wars, a critical election year, all on top of a post-pandemic work ethos lingering… I have not seen anything like it in 40 years of entrepreneurship. Remedy: it is better to make decisions and adjust or recalibrate than remain indecisive. Do not wait for the dist to settle to make decisions… get used to these times, as more change and upheaval are coming.
This type of cycle occurs regularly in mature sectors and I believe is less related to hybrid or zoom work. I’ve found a few key drivers to be sector macro uncertainty, cost efficiency focus and a lack of strategic urgency. When these are present an overall slowdown in decision making or lack there of can be expected.
Outcome-obsessed leader and advisor.
1moWill, I wonder if some of this hand-wringing might be a function of a poorly-understood target, or misalignment around what the actual target is. This makes decisions which should be binary much more difficult to answer. Should we invest in marketing? Spin up a new product or feature? Grow the team? Partner with another company? The answer to all of these questions has to be informed by their strategic relationship to the outcome the business is pursuing. I think sometimes that thesis is known in only some parts of the org. In other cases, it's anecdotally understood but not in a codified way. Thanks as always for thoughtful commentary!
Cross-Functional Operator, Integrator, and Catalyst
1moOffering a boots-on-the-ground perspective about the challenges Will highlights in this insightful post. I relate to Will's observation that teams in matrix organization settings can struggle to move in unison while waiting for leadership to make swift decisions coupled with clear communication. I work with a company that spans multiple countries and time zones and is overhauling its decision-making framework. They adopted EOS two years ago and are leaning into its teachings to borrow from its robust accountability playbook. We hypothesize that we can adapt its principles to enhance our decision-making systems by mapping decision jurisdictions across roles, functions, and departments, identifying overlap, and refining our processes to ensure decisions are smooth, timely, and communicated where overlap is unavoidable. We are also implementing a decision-making framework by distilling 3 types of decisions with corresponding approaches: Decisions about problems, decisions about communicating information, and decisions for vetting ideas. We are still in the early stages of this experiment, but I thought I would share our approach if there are folks here using EOS and facing the challenges highlighted in Will's post.
Perhaps it’s a fear of accountability. We had a 10 year run where the economy grew and everything seemed to work. Then we had Covid and nobody had any accountability. So now, the economy is slowing, companies aren’t hiring at the same pace and people are afraid to make decisions. It seems safer to hide behind bureaucracy.