185 Posts Found

Not long after James Everingham joined Instagram as the head of engineering, results came back from the employee satisfaction survey that’s conducted every six months. The marks were pretty good, but one problem spot caught Everingham’s eye: the low transparency score.

Transparency is a persistent, thorny problem because we’re not all on the same page about what it even means. To Everingham, transparency was about building … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: Instagram

What a lot of people who need to carry out decisions want to know are two things in addition to the decision. Why? Because why gives them context. It gives them more clarity on how this connects to other things and what the full set of expectations are about what the decision is supposed to produce and why we made it and what the tradeoffs … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Aaron De Smet | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

To make a good decision, you need to have a sense of two things: how different choices change the likelihood of different outcomes and how desirable each of those outcomes is.

Content: Quotation | Author: Walter Frick | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

One of the first things I like to do in a meeting is get clarity on what decision is being made and who has the decision rights. If the answer to either is vague or unclear, you should cancel the meeting and reconvene when you have clarity on these two points. If there’s ambiguity as to who has decision making rights for a particular topic, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mike Brown | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

Don’t let decisions get pushed up. A lot of times you see decisions get kicked up to the more senior level, and so they get made by people who happen to be sitting around a certain table, not the people who know the facts. Don’t let this happen.

Content: Quotation | Author: Kim Scott | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

Somehow people’s egos get invested in making decisions. If they get left out, they feel almost a loss of personhood. So you get ego-based decisions instead of fact-based decisions. The more you push yourself and your managers out of the process, the better your decisions will be.

Content: Quotation | Author: Kim Scott | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Decision Making

[Andrew Fastow] thinks all management decisions should face one simple question. “If this company were privately owned, and I were leaving this company to my grandchildren, would I make this decision?”

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas Watson | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

The design of defaults is thus of great importance. And that importance is only magnified by the flawed nature of human decision making. Although lawmakers, economists, and providers of healthcare and social services used to assume that people based decisions on their own rational self-interest, seven decades of behavioral data have demonstrated that this is rarely true. In reality, people are influenced by random factors … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Managers typically spend roughly 80 per cent of their time solving a problem and only 20 per cent actually examining the problem and its context. For situations of high complexity or novelty, another approach is required such that 80 per cent of one’s time is spent exploring the challenge and its context.

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles J. Palus | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

It is a waste of time to worry about what will be acceptable and what the decision maker should or should not say so as not to evoke resistance. (The things one worries about seldom happen, while objections and difficulties no one thought about may suddenly turn out to be almost insurmountable obstacles.) In other words, the decision maker gains nothing by starting out with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Decision Making

Effective executives know when a decision has to be based on principle and when it should be made pragmatically, on the merits of the case. They know the trickiest decision is that between the right and the wrong compromise, and they have learned to tell one from the other. They know that the most time-consuming step in the process is not making the decision but … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Decision Making

Gil Shklarski, CTO at Flatiron Health, has adapted a framework from his executive coach Marcy Swenson to serve as a tool for his team to quickly and efficiently create alignment around decision-making — and at the same time, foster a level of psychological safety that would take fear, self-consciousness and anxiety out of the process.

Content: Article | Author: Gil Shklarski | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Any organization can improve the speed and quality of its decisions by paying more attention to what it’s deciding.

Content: Article | Authors: Aaron De Smet, Gerald Lackey, Leigh M. Weiss | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on what is important. They try to make the few important decisions on the highest level of conceptual understanding. They try to find the constants in a situation, to think through what is strategic and generic rather than to “solve problems.” They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision making; rather, they … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

Just because information may be incomplete, based on conjecture, or notably biased does not mean that it should be treated as “garbage.” Soft information does have value. Sometimes, it may even be essential, especially when people try to “connect the dots” between more exact inputs or make a best guess for the emerging future.

To optimize available information in an intelligent, nuanced way, companies should strive … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Helen Mayhew, Simon Williams, Tamim Saleh | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, IT / Technology / E-Business, Knowledge Management, Management

Leaders also have to understand that group decision making falls into two distinct steps, which require different approaches. In the first step — identifying solutions — divergence is necessary. The group has to be encouraged to explore boundaries, search broadly, and expand its thinking in order to find the best options for the problem at hand. But the second step, in which the group selects … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Cass R. Sunstein, Ken Favaro, Reid Hastie | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

our approach to prediction seems stuck in the past. Most business forecasts fail to include measurable outcomes and are not recorded, so it is hard to know if we are even getting better at them.

Research from organizational psychologist Philip Tetlock, the co-author of Superforecasting, suggests an alternative. Studying forecasting tournaments where anonymous experts predicted future events, Tetlock found that some forecasters could … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Danny Hernandez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Productivity / Work Tips

Research suggests that checklists can help reduce the influence of unconscious bias in decision making. Google has tested checklists like these to highlight and remind people of common unconscious biases and provide employees with targeted unbiasing strategies.

Content: Article | Source: re:Work | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Productivity / Work Tips

Charlan Nemeth at Berkeley […] finds is that people aren’t actually persuaded by devil’s advocates most of the time. One, they don’t argue forcefully enough because they don’t really believe the position: it’s “All right, I’m going to play a role here. I’ve checked the box, and now I can go right back to the majority view.”

And then, second, even if they do argue with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

There’s an amazing study by Justin Berg, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor. He looks at circus performances—think Cirque du Soleil—and collects all these original acts done by different kinds of circus artists: jugglers, dancers, acrobats. He asks people to evaluate their own performances, and then he asks managers to evaluate them as well, and then he has performers judge each other’s videos.

Finally, he … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Creativity, Decision Making, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior