How to Make Decisions as a Team (When That Team Keeps Growing)
By: Jamie Carr
Tags: Work, Leadership, Startup Lessons, Productivity, Startup

Reframing decisions.

At their core, the decisions we make every day, both at home and at work are nothing more than bets. As much as we like to think we make decisions based on all the available information, this is rarely the case. Without all of the information, we are essentially betting on the outcome of whatever we decide based on the limited information we have.

We don’t like to admit this because we all want to think that if a decision is being made, especially in the world of business, the decision-maker is sure it will be right. In a startup, this is magnified as often you will be doing something disruptive, new or different, meaning that the answers will rarely be laid out in front of you. After all, you will never be 100% certain of a future that does not exist yet.

Over the last year in my current role, I have been part of a project to design and build an entirely new product that will be taking the company in a new direction. This has been an exciting project with lots of moving parts. With a team that was growing quickly around us, it was vital that, as the product team, we were able to communicate what we called our “comfortable uncertainty” to the wider organization.

Early on, it becomes easy for conversations to end up descending into “Do we even know x is going to work?” which was absolutely the wrong way to be thinking about delivering a new product, especially when trying to do something disruptive. This question is unhelpful in several ways but ultimately at its core lies the question “Are we 100% certain?” which as we know, is just not possible.

In a world where we are thinking in bets, the question we can ask ourselves is “Have we done enough to be confident in this decision”. By asking this, we can move the conversation away from a binary position and enable ourselves to have a more constructive discussion, where we can understand the actions and decisions we have made to get to where we are. This, however, has required a pretty significant shift in the fundamental culture of the organization, moving to a world where everyone understands and embraces the fact that the decisions we make as a team are moving us in a direction where we cannot possibly know all the answers. This becomes even more difficult as the team grows and new hires start to become more specialized coming from larger, more mature organizations where this way of thinking often goes against conventional wisdom.

Moving to comfortable uncertainty

In our experience, the first step in adopting this new way of thinking about decision making in your growing team is to train everyone to be comfortable in this uncertainty. This should absolutely be a trait you look for in new hires and something that should be preached internally. This is, however, easier said than done. Merely stating that the team now has to be more comfortable without knowing the answers will be seen by skeptics as passive management or poor planning. We have found it crucial to be able to give tangible evidence, a north star metric or a stick in the ground far in the future that people can look at. “We don’t know all the answers now, but we know this is where we are heading”.

Many people will always feel a certain way when they hear the word bet in this context. It implies that we, as an organization, are going to leave our decisions to chance or take wild stabs in the dark. This simply isn’t the case. Thinking in bets is all about how you can frame decision making; it is not “I bet this will work.” Like any bet, we must ask “How confident am I of my decision, and what is my threshold based on its importance?”. Larger decisions will, of course, require us to have more confidence, whereas there will be smaller, less destructive decisions that we can make quickly with less confidence. Framing it in this way reduces the need to find a definitive solution and instead forces us to allocate it the correct amount of effort relative to its importance. This not only allows us the ability to make more decisions faster but also helps us prioritize the most critical issues and make sure we are focusing on the right things.