What are your most important decisions?

Your success depends on two things: Luck and your decisions. As such, decision intelligence is very important. Despite this importance, many organizations are unclear about what their most important decisions are. To make the most of things such as AI analytics, we need to get clear about what decisions we are looking to make.

Here is a template for decision intelligence. It’s not exhaustive nor perfect. That said, it will hopefully trigger the right conversations in your management team, starting with “How do we know which decisions are most important for our success?”. I’ve included a couple of tabs with examples for large corporations as well as startups.

If I were to wake up every person in your management team and ask them what the ten most important decisions you are making every year as a management team are, would they be able to answer? If they answer, would they all answer the same? Seeing what an impact decisions have on success, it’s a bit surprising that we are rather unclear about what the most important decisions are.

The benefits of getting more deliberate about decision intelligence are amongst other things:

A more aligned organization - By agreeing on the most important decisions to drive your organization, you will get a more aligned direction as this will trigger a lot of important discussions.

Better results - By clarifying the key decisions to be made and what data can help you make them, you have the chance of achieving better results as it will help you invest energy where it matters most.

Clarity on automation/productivity opportunities - Not all decisions require only manual labor, some/a lot of them can be automated to different degrees. This can help your productivity.

In many management teams there are lots of reviews without decisions. It could be weekly trading meetings, or talent reviews, or supplier reviews. Lots of information, but less deliberate decisions. Instead of investing a lot of valuable time simply reviewing things, consider leading with the decisions you want to make. Then ask yourself if a review is the best way to make those decisions, or if it’s better to for example have everyone in the management team shadow different people in the organization for a month to see what is going on in practice, not just in a theoretical review. I’m not saying that reviews are not needed, they are. I’m just saying that we should lead with what decisions we need to make and then conclude how to best make them.

So, what are your most important decisions? Do you know? Do you agree with your colleagues? Make a copy of this template and get started. Hope helps.