Deciding to Change: Choosing

When organizations decide to do something different from what they've been doing, the changes they undertake might involve changing more than what they do. Sometimes they must also restructure the way they make decisions. For example, the relative importance of software engineers and actuaries in insurance companies has changed significantly in the past 50 years. Although software engineering is more important today in such organizations than it once was, one can debate whether the political power of the people engaged in software engineering today parallels the importance of their profession in executing the mission of the organization.

Elective change in organizations sometimes exposes conflicts of interest between the interests of the organization and the interests of the people who must make the decision to change. In some cases, this conflict of interest is resolved not in the favor of the organization, but in favor of the personal interests of the decision makers. When that happens, the organization remains stuck on paths that lead to stagnation, contraction, and — possibly — bankruptcy.

What can we do about this? Here are four suggestions for enhancing decision quality.

Recusal

A pattern of participation in decisions that affect the personal interests of the decision makers is a performance issue. In politics and jurisprudence, excusing oneself from such participation is called recusal. The practice is rare even there, but with the exception of certain professional standards, it's almost totally absent from organizational life. Would not organizations that succeed in incorporating recusal into their decision processes gain significant advantages in decision quality?

Inclusion

The dual of recusal is inclusion. In most organizations, the same group of decision makers makes all the big decisions. From time to time, they do seek advice from specialists, but the specialists' role is advisory only — they rarely have decision authority. Are there not classes of decisions that would be improved by including some people who are customarily excluded from decision making?

Decision process risk management

Even among A pattern of participation in
decisions that affect the
personal interests of the
decision makers is
a performance issueorganizations that recognize the importance of risk management, risk management practice tends to emphasize what the organizations does, rather than how the organization makes decisions. Certainly all organizations make bad decisions once in a while. Can we not use risk management principles to protect ourselves from these mistakes?

Retrospectives

Most important, perhaps, is a practice often called "lessons learned," or retrospectives. Retrospectives help us avoid repeating our own mistakes — or the mistakes of others. Although widely used in the lower reaches of the org chart, they are much less common at high levels. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that requiring self-examination of others is easier than asking it of oneself?

Which of these practices do you recognize in the decision-making process of your own organization? Which are absent from it?   First issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

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Related articles

More articles on Organizational Change:

Don't Rebuild the Chrysler Building

When we undertake change, we're usually surprised at the effort and cost required. Much of this effort and cost is necessary because of the nature of the processes we're changing. What can we do differently to make change easier in the future?

The Ties that Bind

Changing anything in an organization reveals how it's connected to its people, to its processes, to its facilities, and to the overall context. Usually, these connections reach out much further into the organization than we imagine.

Letting Go of the Status Quo: the Debate

Before we can change, we must want to change, or at least accept that we must change. And somewhere in there, we must let go of some part of what is now in place — the status quo. In organizations, the decision to let go involves debate.

Contrary Indicators of Psychological Safety: I

To take the risks that learning and practicing new ways require, we all need a sense that trial-and-error approaches are safe. Organizations seeking to improve processes would do well to begin by assessing their level of psychological safety.

Contrary Indicators of Psychological Safety: III

When we first perform actions or play roles unfamiliar to us, we make mistakes. We learn new ways not only by reading or being told, but also by practicing. Unless we feel that making mistakes at first is acceptable, learning might never occur.

See also Organizational Change and Organizational Change for more related articles.

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