Decision Meetings help strike a balance between making decisions quickly and making them well.
They're one-off meetings that don’t fit into a recurring schedule and their goal is to make thoughtful decisions in a short amount of time.
They’re one of the tools we can use to help us when Making Decisions.
A process for Decision Meetings
Before calling a decision meeting, you should write up a proposal (Writing Proposals). Then follow this process:
- Share your proposal with the relevant people and ask them for comments. Amend your proposal as you get feedback.
- When everybody is generally happy with one of the proposed solutions, schedule a meeting to have a final discussion and make the decision.
- Document the decision somewhere and communicate it to the rest of the team.
The extra up-front by one person allows for people to make more thoughtful decisions in their own time and the net time savings across the whole group are often huge. It also means there's a documented record of decisions that can be searched for later.
In some cases you can use a "lite" version of this process by writing a short proposal and calling a decision meeting immediately. Spend the first ten minutes of the meeting in silence, commenting on and amending the proposal. Then discuss and make the decision.
Summary & Key Points
Decision meetings are a useful tool for making better decisions. By shifting much of the work to before the meeting, we can save a lot of time.