“decision throughput” as a magic metric to spark your team
You’re feeling stuck, like your team is wading through knee-deep swamp, muck sucking at your boots with each step. Getting things done is slow and painful. Simple problems somehow get complicated.
You look down the hall or across the Zoom interface at That Other Team and feel mystified, jealous. They seem feisty, agile, and seamless. They outpace you and seem to have more fun doing it.
What gives?
A hyper-insightful CEO I once worked for shared a phrase with me that helped me understand and close this frustrating gap: “decision throughput”.
“Throughput” is an engineering term for how many units move through a process. How many car doors move down the conveyor belt each hour. How many lines of code make it out of the engineering department each week. Higher throughput usually means a better designed process. Some leader somewhere has replaced the sloth of ambiguity with the quickness of clarity.
“Decision throughput” is useful for leaders because it forces you to look at a very visible, lagging output (decisions) and soup up the motor that generates that output (how decisions get made).
Decision throughput is especially important for executive teams. There’s relatively equal power among most of the participants and the rest of the organization depends on this group for guidance. So you have the potential for slow, politicized debate at high cost to the rest of the organization. Higher decision throughput can also spark outsized change for teams that aren’t in the midst of an obvious emergency.
On exec teams and in the regular course of business, it’s easy for decision throughput to drop. Meetings become circular debates or flaccid series of updates that generate minimal action. For any leader or teammate who is interested in making a difference, for the team and in the world, it’s an especially frustrating pattern of motion without action. It’s boring. It’s aggravating. More importantly, it’s ineffective.
By contrast, teams with relatively high decision throughput get more done, learn faster, and are more fun and equitable. There’s more action, there are more pieces of the action, and more people get to touch and use those pieces.
A team with high decision throughput is like a lab that can run loads of experiments at one time, then run subsequent experiments building on their findings from round one. A team with low decision throughput is like a lab that’s stuck in a gnarly federal grant application process, hoping they’ll have funding to run one big experiment next year. Which lab do you think is going to make the killer breakthrough first?
I don’t have a precise and absolute number you should reach for here. Rough and relative measures can shed light, though, on what you might try. Back of the envelope - how many decisions does your team make in a given meeting, week, month? How does this compare to the number from a quarter or a year ago? Any trends? What would be required to 2x or 5x or 10x your decision throughput? What tradeoffs - benefits and costs - would you embrace at that much higher rate of decision making?
More likely than not, achieving that higher throughput requires a few things, each of which is useful in its own right:
Getting clear about which decisions are worthy of expensive consideration and which are not (the Type 1 and Type 2 decision framework is helpful here, see link below)
Pushing the power to decide “down” in the hierarchy so senior leaders aren’t a bottleneck on action and learning
In a flatter structure, granting the power to decide to an individual instead of requiring consensus from the group
Embracing a culture of continuous learning, with a ship->feedback->re-ship cycle at its core
Finding intellectual honesty and humility about the limitations of any group, especially experienced senior leaders, in the face of uncertainty
For more on decision throughput, check out:
Reid Hoffman on OODA loops
Daniel Kahneman on “decision hygiene”
Dustin Moskowitz on the paradox of choice
Jeff Bezos on Type 1 and Type 2 decisions
Aaron Dignan on cultures of permission and cultures of constraint
-Eric
