Getting It Right
As leaders, one of our greatest responsibilities is to ensure the best decisions possible are made for our schools. And the stakes are high. The learning, livelihoods, and life outcomes of real people are influenced by our decisions.
Decision-making processes can (and should!) be energizing, engaging, and informative. Well-run processes can lead to stronger relationships, deeper trust, and better outcomes for our students, families, and colleagues. Unfortunately, there is also a risk of decision making being inefficient, ineffective, anxiety-provoking, discouraging, and even damaging.
There is an art to facilitating decision making – an art I’m still learning. I admit I’ve made some poor and ineffective decisions in my career. I’ve also successfully made extremely important decisions at times when the stakes were high. When I’ve gotten it right, I paid as much attention to the process by which decisions are made as I did to the substance of the decision (e.g., whether to adopt a new curriculum, how to respond to harm, what to say when faced with crisis, whether or not to hire a particular candidate, etc.).
In order to determine WHAT to decide, we first need to figure out HOW to decide.
“It’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
– Tony Robbins –
Deciding How to Decide
“A good process produces good results.”
School leaders make hundreds of small and large decisions every week, and many make dozens of very highly important decisions each year. In my view, decision-making is one of the most essential competencies for school leaders. That’s why it is so surprising that few certification and training programs explicitly teach aspiring leaders how to make decisions well.
There are countless books, courses, frameworks, and tools designed to help us approach decisions. But there are two in particular that I find myself using often: the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making and the RAPID framework.
I use them because they are easy to remember, to explain, and to apply.
Participatory Decision-Making
I first came across the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner when I worked as a facilitator for the Boston Public Schools. If you’re responsible for making important decisions on a regular basis, you need to read this book. It is full of tips and tools that you can use to improve both the inclusiveness of decision-making processes and the quality of decisions.
What I found most useful is the language used to describe types of “decision rules” (i.e., decision-making processes) and the rationale for selecting one rule over another. The most common decision rules are in the graphic above:
- unanimous agreement,
- majority vote,
- delegation,
- person-in-charge decides after discussion,
- person-in-charge decides without discussion, and
- “flip a coin.”
How do you choose a rule? Well, consider the context and needs. Is time limited? Are the stakes high? Is the problem complex? Will the decision have long-term (or even permanent) effects? Is broad buy-in and understanding a requirement? Well, the “decision rule” you choose should reflect these contextual factors.
When I have sufficient lead time, I most commonly find myself using “person-in-charge decides after discussion” as my default process. It takes time to ask for, consider, and process input. But I find discussion actually takes far LESS time than getting an important decision wrong because you didn’t consider all of the angles or identify blindspots.
I challenge you to find ANY other book with an 18-syllable title that contains as much practical wisdom as this one :). Buy it – the paperback version if you can. You won’t be disappointed.
What is RAPID?
RAPID is an acronym developed by Bain & Company, Inc., that was later adapted by the Bridgespan Group. Its purpose is to clarify which of five roles each person is playing in making a certain decision:
- R – Recommend
- A – Agree
- P – Perform
- I – Input
- D – Decide
Why do I gravitate to this model? It’s because I know what it feels like to believe (wrongly) that my job was to Decide when really my only role was to Perform the decision. It’s an awful feeling. And it’s one that leaders can easily avoid inflicting on team members.
Before embarking on a decision-making process, simply communicate which individuals and groups are playing each of the five RAPID roles. That’s it.
So for example, tell people who is Deciding. If you have sole decision-making responsibility, make that clear. If it’s another leader in the organization that needs to make the call, let people know up front. If the decision will be made more democratically through unanimous agreement or by majority vote, explain that from the outset. What’s the main idea here? Be clear. Be proactive. Don’t surprise people.
Give It a Shot
When you’re preparing to make the next key decision, please pause for a minute.
Before you start working on WHAT to decide, take a moment to think about HOW to decide and let people know.
Don’t underestimate the importance of deciding how to decide.
Here’s our template that brings all of the above ideas together. It takes 5 minutes to use and will dramatically improve the quality of your decision-making processes and communication.