You have to own the decision

If you’re a founder or leader, whether you’re solo or part of a team, most of your job is going to be making decisions. If that sounds like the exact thing you don’t want, then you may want to rethink your career.

I’m only partially joking. You see, one of the biggest reasons I see decisions get made and then promptly abandoned is stupidly simple (and easily avoidable once you know how to fix it). It’s that nobody took actual ownership.

Consider this story of an agency founder I worked with many moons ago. Let’s call her Sarah. Sarah was running a small boutique agency, the sort where everyone is creative, everyone has an equal say in how the agency is run. More arty collective than capitalist hellscape.

Sarah came to us because she (and her team) had realised there was a new market opportunity opening up. AI companies were starting to pop up all over the place and a lot of their brands left a lot to be desired. (Read: AI slop). Sarah wanted help to see if moving into this market was commercially viable, and what it might look like in terms of their positioning and messaging.

In other words, Sarah had come to us with a decision already half-formed. That’s 50% more than a lot of business owners I’ve worked with in the past. And so we took Sarah and her team through our process. Eventually, we collectively agreed that yes, the AI market was commercially viable but only if they went all in on doing so. Sarah was ready to go. But some of her team were less thrilled. Nonetheless, we finished our work with them, and the general consensus was that Sarah, as the boss, had the final say.

Six months later we checked back in with Sarah. Nothing had changed. No decision was made.

Too many cooks

I suspect anyone who has consulted, coached, or advised businesses has seen this exact pattern play out plenty of times. I know I have. In fact, it’s one of the patterns that led me to start teaching about decision-making in the first place.

Scientists call this “process loss”. The idea that there’s an optimal number of people who should be on the decision-making team. Once you go over that threshold, the quality of output starts to decrease with every extra person. Several studies have confirmed this and tried to calculate that perfect number. Hackman and Vidmar, for example, settled on 4.6 (and clearly hadn’t heard of rounding up!). [1]

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos echoes this finding with his “two pizza” rule. The idea being that any internal team should be small enough that two pizzas is enough to feed them. Though less scientifically accurate, I like the memorability of this one. And the thought of pizza.

But in my opinion the exact number is variable. It relies on too many factors (social cohesion, importance of decision, demographic makeup, etc) to truly give you a number that’s right. The key thing, as far as I’m concerned, is how you can mitigate process loss, or the “many cooks effect” as I prefer to call it.

Just a bystander

New York, 1964, and 37 people witnessed the assault and murder of a young woman named Kitty Genovese. Not one of them did anything about it. Though now seen as an exaggerated story, it led researchers to dig deeper into why a group of people seemingly do nothing in response to an event. And it led to the “bystander effect” becoming one of the most widely known phenomena in psychology.

Latané and Darley, two researchers who were both mortified and deeply curious about what happened in New York, devised an ingenious study. [2] College students who volunteered for a study (not knowing the real focus of the research) were seated in a waiting room to complete a questionnaire. Slowly but surely, smoke started to seep into the room through a vent. The students were either alone, in a small group, or with actors who were also in on the study and instructed to not react.

75% of the solo students reported the smoke. But when grouped with two other participants only 38% reported it. The students sat with the actors? Only 10%.

This is a classic example of “diffusion of responsibility”. If other people are around, we can’t help but feel like they can take care of it instead. Or worse, if they aren’t reacting, then I don’t need to either. This is why so many people could witness a murder and do nothing. They’d assume that someone else was already taking care of it.

Owning the decision

Which brings us back to Sarah. Sarah’s group was 5 people. Slightly over the number suggested by Hackman and Vidmar, but arguably small enough to be fed by two pizzas. But in my opinion, the size of the group wasn’t the problem here. The lack of ownership was.

Getting multiple inputs and perspectives is no bad thing. In fact, it helps you identify your blind spots and biases in a way making a solo decision won’t. Involving her team was a smart play on Sarah’s part. But where Sarah went wrong was that she turned it into a group decision. She implicitly gave everyone an equal say. Explicitly gave everyone a vote.

So responsibility was diffused. Nobody took charge. Sarah didn’t own the decision. What Sarah should have done was solicit input from her team but make it clear that the decision was hers and hers alone. Yes that sounds a little dictatorial but it’s also part and parcel of being a leader. The calls are yours to make. So you have to own them. That way, Sarah would be empowered to act on the final decision, and the team would have to go along with it and do whatever needed to be done.

So next time you feel like a decision is stalling, ask yourself whether you’ve explicitly taken ownership of it, even if it’s as simple as saying it out loud.

References:

1: Effects of Size and Task Type on Group Performance and Member Reactions, Hackman and Vidmar, 1970

2: Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies, Latané and Darley, 1968