Valuable and Effective Decision Making - Part Three: Decision Roles

In Parts One and Two of this series we looked at Decision Criteria and Methods. For each of the four methods, there are distinct Decision Roles:

• In Authoritative decision-making, there is only one role, the Decider, who makes the decision on his or her own, consultation optional.
• In Democratic decision-making, those participating are Deliberators and Voters, in an agreed-upon protocol for how decisions are made (majority, plurality, etc.).
• In Consensus decision-making, everyone is a Deliberator, and decisions must be made unanimously.

There are many forms of what we are calling Contributive Decision-Making, e.g. RACI. In this article, I am following Connolly and Rianoshek’s classification called DEARS). The roles in Contributive Decision-Making are Decider, Executors, Advisors, Recipients, and Sponsor. We will discuss these in detail in the next section.

As we discussed in Part Two, each of these decision-making methods has different outcomes for engagement (execution) and time-to-decision. Work with thousands of project teams across a number of industries around the world has led me to the conclusion that for complex projects in a fast-changing environment, Contributive Decision-Making is the best approach, maximizing the wisdom of the team while at the same time not sacrificing speed of decision. A number of writers, notably James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, have noted that, under the right conditions, any group will reliably come up with smarter answers than its smartest members or a group of experts would have come up with on their own. Contributive Decision-Making combines a single accountability for making the decision with maximum opportunity for learning on the decision makers part and input from all involved.

As we've noted, every complex project will involve delegation, and for delegation to work there need to be clear roles. Here are the roles in Contributive Decision-Making.

Decider

The Decider (and there is only one Decider for each decision step) has the ultimate authority to decide and Is in the best position to assess the system value at stake for customers, stakeholders and employees. The Decider is accountable for learning from every issue raised by the Executors and Advisors and making a decision that maximizes system value. The Decider is also accountable for the consequences of the decision

Executors

The Executor is the person or persons accountable for executing the decision. Executors have the duty of giving input about feasibility, consequences and value of the decision. Executors must be skilled at raising issues with the Decider in a way that clearly serves the business purpose at stake.

Advisors

Advisors are subject matter experts who have important perspectives granted by their specific skills and experience. Advisors have the duty to raise issues related to their areas of expertise; they, too, must raise issues that clearly serve the business purpose. Frequently an Advisor can help design the decision team to ensure the right participation relative to business risk.

Recipients

The Recipients are those who needs only to be informed of the decision to be able to act accordingly. Recipients play no role in the decision-making process.

Sponsor

The Sponsor has a dual accountability: To connect with larger system issues that inform the decision and to escalate the path for resolving stuck issues

Clearly delineating these roles ensures that the right people are involved in the decision-making process (and that no one who does not need to be involved is involved), that everyone who needs to be informed of the decision is informed and that different parts of the project are coordinated, and that organizational support and resources are able to be accessed.