Home / The Leadership Library / Leadership Principles / Decision-Making
Decision-Making
Reversibility, decision rights, the unbooked cost of delay, and the discipline of reviewing your own choices.
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01
The Decision Log
A plain-text record of what you decided and what you expected, written before the outcome. Six fields, ten minutes, and it only works if nobody else can read it.
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02
Reversing Yourself Without Losing Credibility
What costs a leader credibility is not the reversal. It is reversing without naming what changed, which leaves the organization to guess who applied the pressure.
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03
Deciding Against Advice
People can absorb being overruled. What they cannot absorb is a stated reason that is not the real one, because they will check it against what they know.
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04
Consensus, Consultation, Command
Three legitimate modes for reaching a decision. The damage comes not from choosing the wrong one but from running one while appearing to run another.
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05
Who Decides: Allocating Decision Rights
Most organizations have never written down who decides what. The map exists anyway, assembled informally from habit and precedent, and it is discovered only when it fails.
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06
The Unbooked Cost of Delay
Waiting is the only decision an organization can make without anyone being accountable for it. That, rather than caution, is why so much of it happens.
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07
Sort by Reversibility, Not by Importance
How much process a decision deserves should be set by how hard it is to undo, not by how large it looks. Size is visible, reversibility is not, and organizations sort on the visible…
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08
The Anatomy of a Decision
Choosing, deciding, and committing are three separate acts. Most organizations perform the first, believe they have done all three, and then wonder why the matter keeps returning.