5 ways to improve Organisational Decision-Making

By adopting a carefully considered approach to decision rights, organisations can foster a culture of transparency and accountability that will help them become more adaptive, responsive to customer needs, and competitive in the market.

As important as it is to get decisions “right,” a surprising number of organisations lack clarity about just what decisions need to be made, who is responsible for making them, and how the decision-making process should unfold.

Research shows that in many organisations, ambiguity surrounding who is responsible for making a decision (or decisions) is a primary cause of delay in the decision-making process. Such delays can cause an organisation to lose valuable time developing new products, updating current products to meet changing consumer demands, and entering new markets.

Fortunately, getting decision rights right depends on a surprisingly small set of factors, according to a Deloitte analysis. Organisations that have established an effective decision-making strategy tend to do the following:

Simplify and clarify decision rights across the organisation

Identify and clearly communicate who is responsible for making which decisions, what decisions must be made, and how the decision-making process should work. Simplicity and clarity in decision rights can sometimes prove to be the missing ingredients in a transformation effort that seems to have got stuck.

Establish strong, transparent accountability for decisions

Accountability is not about identifying where to place the blame for decisions gone wrong. Instead, it’s about evaluating outcomes against agreed-upon metrics and determining how broadly within the organisation to share those evaluations. The aim is to enable the organisation to better learn from both its failures and successes.

Align individuals in decisionmaking groups to a common mission

Unhelpful competition and dissent within a decision-making group can slow the process and sabotage decision quality. Establishing a clear common mission for the group can help counter this risk, allowing the group to reach decisions more quickly and with less unnecessary debate.

Encourage distributed authority.

When appropriate, empowering employees at all levels to make decisions can pay off in greater agility and responsiveness. To avoid creating confusion, it’s important to explicitly articulate which frontline workers have the authority to make which decisions under what circumstances.

Prioritise the customer voice in decisions

Among the most important ways to better understand customer wants and needs is for organisations to listen more closely to what their customers are saying. Giving customer-facing workers more decision-making authority is one way to increase customers’ influence and the company’s responsiveness to their needs.

For more information, please visit www.deloitte.com/mt/consulting

“Such delays can cause an organisation to lose valuable time developing new products, updating current products to meet changing consumer demands, and entering new markets.”