"Make sure you loop Jerry in, he should know about this"
Aligning on decision making power to move faster.
Experimentation moves into different areas of the business. As you bump into new stakeholders, a growth team needs to define a decision-making process to stay out of trouble.
Our team looks to answer two questions:
What decisions can any of us make without advice or permission?
When should we seek advice?
To answer these questions we build a 'waterline'. Gore lists a 'waterline' as one of their guiding principles which ensures consultation with key stakeholders before taking an action "below the waterline".
Every 6 months we go through a waterline exercise to list out decisions to be made without advice or consultation and decisions that will require advice or outside consultation. We identify what's in our control and when to bring in stakeholders to help us get experiments to the finish line.
Here are a few specific examples from our last session:
Afterward, we discuss the cards above and beneath the line to find ways to build confidence with stakeholders to bring more cards above the waterline to enable faster decision making.
Expanding further on this concept, we dive into individual roles. As a growth designer, what decisions can be made without consultation with the rest of the team? Likewise as a manager or engineer. In "Brave New Work", Aaron Dignan suggests teams define their rights by roles to establish trust and faster decision making.
"How many people in how many roles lack the authority they need to do their jobs well? In a dynamic and fast-changing world, preventing people from using judgment and making decisions is just too slow" - Aaron Dignan, Brave New Work
After this exercise, we go into our day-to-day knowing the decisions we can make on our own, as a team, or with outside stakeholders. This process is repeated every 6 months. The waterline is documented and shared with the rest of the organization to bring transparency into how we operate.
This helps us avoid looping people in when… they really don’t need to be.
How do you work on your decision-making process?