The Decision Action Loop

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Two types of activity occur in the course of any initiative. Decisions are made and Actions are taken. Make the right decisions and you’ll take the right actions. Actions give rise to new questions which require decisions.

The pace of the work is dictated by the Decisions/ Action loop. But decisions take time. Too long, usually. The good news is that this is under your control.

The work moves best when the decision and the action are made by the same person, or by a tightly connected team that can make good decisions quickly.

When the team knows what decisions they can make, what liberties they can take, things will be humming. The challenge arises when it’s unclear who needs to make the decision. Who can  approve this spend? Do we have the latitude to move this milestone? We need to broadcast the customer but marketing is at an offsite today.

Here are some techniques that will speed up your decision/ action loops:

  • Steering meetings are update and decision sessions. A bi-weekly schedule is usually sufficient for the team to update leadership and request timely decisions. Skip a meeting and you may let the team down.
  • Provide the team with guardrails to clarify their scope of influence. This will allow them to proceed with confidence unless the decision falls outside the bounds of budget approval, schedule delays, customer communications, resource allocation, or strategy.
  • Have a leadership sponsor attend the team’s frequent updates.  The sponsor can move the guardrails and make a decision on the spot. But the role here is primarily as coach to enhance the team’s confidence in decision-making. Whether these are weekly status meetings or daily scrums, sponsor participation should take no more than 90 minutes a week. If the work is important enough, sponsors will make the time.
  • Maintaining a roster of decisions. Traceability is useful if things don’t go as planned. Your project manager will handle this best.

Empowering Decisions

With your hand on your heart, answer these questions for a recent major  initiative:

  1. Was your team generally able to make timely decisions without delay?
  2. Did you give them appropriate guiderails and latitude?
  3. If the work was delayed by decision-making, how could this have been avoided?
  4. Was leadership able to keep their finger on the pulse and make the right decisions where needed?

Ask these questions in all your project retrospectives to get the team's candid  feedback. Share your results with me at graham@primeFusion.ca and I'll give you mine.