Decision-making habits that actually help small teams

Small teams make a lot of decisions. Most of them are fine. A handful of them, made badly or not made at all, cause most of the problems. The goal is not to make every decision perfectly; it is to make the important ones well and stop the unimportant ones from taking up the same amount of time.

Write down what you decided ¶

This sounds obvious. It is not consistently done. After any meeting where a decision is made, someone should write down what was decided, who is responsible for acting on it, and by when. Not in the meeting notes buried in a shared drive. In a short message sent to everyone in the room within a few hours.

The act of writing it down also catches the decisions that were not actually made. If you cannot write down what was decided, you did not decide anything yet.

Separate the decision from the discussion ¶

Most teams conflate discussion and decision-making, which means discussions go on too long and decisions get made without enough discussion. Ruth's suggestion: at the start of any meeting involving a decision, name the decision explicitly and agree on who has the final call. The discussion can be as wide as it needs to be. The decision belongs to one person or a named group.

This does not mean ignoring dissent. It means the dissent is heard before the decision, not relitigated after it.

Set a decision date ¶

For decisions that are not urgent, the absence of a deadline is the main reason they do not get made. Set a date by which the decision will be made, even if more information might theoretically arrive after that date. Perfect information is not coming. A decision made on good-enough information by a sensible date is almost always better than a decision deferred indefinitely.

None of these habits require new software or a new process. They require someone in the team to hold the line on them consistently. That is usually the hardest part.