Commitment to Action

You may have completed the most perfect decision analysis, but if the recommendation is not actually implemented, the effort is completely wasted. Commitment to action is the sixth and final dimension of decision quality.

There are a lot of people, inside and outside any organisation, who do not want anything to change. Getting buy-in and agreement to a new strategy, by sufficient people that the new strategy is adopted, is therefore critical.

Ideally one would like the decision makers to be totally immersed in the decision process and to develop the alternatives and information. Unfortunately, of course, senior management does not usually have the time to do this, so the analytic effort is delegated to a Project Team. A best practice is for this group to be the people who will eventually be responsible for implementation. By the end of the process they will know all there is to know about the strategy and the drivers of risk and reward, and the recommendation will be theirs, not that of some outside consultant.

Several times I have worked with clients where the Board hired expensive consultants, who worked with the Board to develop the new strategy, interrogating the junior staff only when they needed information. When the new strategy was announced, it had no buy-in from below and was doomed to failure.

The other best practice is to involve in the Decision Board or Steering Committee all those with a power of veto over the decision. Again, I have witnessed situations where an important executive was left out of the strategic dialogue, and the decision was overridden.

A common symptom of an organisation with a problem is when a decision comes back again for review six months or a year after it was supposed to have been agreed. Unless there is some dramatically new information that invalidates the original recommendation, this demonstrates a failure to get commitment to action.

Tools:

• Dialogue decision process (DDP)

Failure Modes:

• Poor quality in other elements
• Continual reworking of a decision
• Insufficient support
• Organisation infrastructure or inertia stifles action
• Lack of motivation

100% decision quality is when we take action. We have buy-in from the project team, steering committee and all those affected by the decision.

Have you experienced the symptoms described above of an inability to commit to action?

This article is one of a series looking at the six dimensions of decision quality.

• Useful frame—are we answering the right question?
• Creative yet feasible alternatives—having a small set of wide-ranging choices
• Meaningful and reliable information, particularly about risk
• Clear preferences and trade-offs
• Sound reasoning, and clear communication about complex issues
• Commitment to action.