#8 Drive good decision making with good criteria

Good decision-making starts with understanding the criteria you’re using to make your judgements. In this issue, we will walk through the process of defining your criteria with a case study.

Reflecting on the four things you can do in a workshop

In a previous issue, I said there are only four things you can do in a workshop; Map, Dream, Distill and Prioritise. Someone asked me why decision-making wasn't called out as one of the types of activity, as it's undoubtedly the key outcome of many sessions. This is important and perhaps something I should have spent time introspecting on (if such a word exists) before writing the issue. The reason, however, is simple; I don't believe that groups of people should make decisions. I think that, based on group prioritisation and the discussion stemming from that, individuals with decision-making power should make informed decisions.

Though the distinction might appear to be semantics initially, there are two reasons it's more important than that.

Firstly, "groups" have a layer of insulation or deniability between the individuals involved and the outcomes. That means they can make decisions that individuals couldn't or wouldn't, notably ones that go against an organisation, product or team's principles or culture, which is rarely positive.

Who made the decision? (First attempt at using Substacks image generator)

The reality is that decisions are ultimately made by an individual. A former colleague once said to me that companies don't exist. They're just groups of individuals who've agreed to create a fiction together. Groups can't be held accountable and viewed as sentient. Giving them the same status as an individual results in a lack of accountability. I firmly believe that decision-makers should own and understand their decisions, even the tough ones. There should be no shame in making a tough decision as long as you can justify and explain it.

Secondly, the expectation of consensus in a group decision means that people who oppose the end decision must accept defeat and bow to the wisdom of "the group" rather than having the opportunity to dissent with grace. Aside from being potentially politically humiliating, that risks silencing people before they start; it means that opinions individuals believe to be uncommon might never get aired because of the risk of losing face, increasing the likeliness of the highest-payed-persons-opinion (HiPPO) being the only opinion heard rather than allowing a genuine dialogue to develop.

These join together to turn group decisions into anti-collaboration rather than the collaborative outcomes we aim for.

Decision-makers can absolutely use their power in the context of a collaborative session. You and your collaborators build, refine and inform the options and resources that lead to the best decision. Together you bring a wealth of opinion, expertise and brainpower to the problem. You are focusing the combined effort of your collaborators on helping the decision maker make a better choice than they could locked in a room on their own.

Let's talk about criteria.

So! After that insight into "John's philosophy of business", let's turn to the main subject of today's issue. Criteria and how you use them to drive good decision-making. There are many prioritisation techniques, from quick and dirty tools like dot voting to much more dynamic prioritisation and weighting tools like Precedence. But the clarity and articulation of your criteria will make or break any of them.

Remember the last time someone asked you to pick "the best" idea. You may have been using sticky dots in a workshop or choosing a day out with your family on WhatsApp.

• What did "the best" mean to you in that context?

• Do you know what it meant to other people facing the same decision?

When it comes to business, it's often the same. Terms like "best" are subjective, ill-defined and impossible to quantify. (As I'll no doubt say many times, facilitation, design and business are all arts, not sciences, so I apologise now for my flagrant abuse of the term quantitive and its variants). We often assume that others understand these terms like we do or share our foreknowledge and worldview. That results in two people coming to distinctly different conclusions but not knowing where to start when explaining why, and this leads us back to a debate rather than the dialogue we aim for as collaborators. Naturally, this often leads to confusion, misunderstandings, and potential conflict.

How do we reduce this confusion?

Good criteria are the magical ingredient that can transform mediocre decision-making into impactful conversations. They are objective, specific, and relevant to the decision being made. Good criteria are the standards or factors used to evaluate and compare options. They should be agreed upon by the team and should reflect project, product or organisation values and goals.

Binary Criteria

There are two types of criteria: Binary criteria and flexible criteria. Binary criteria are the "yes" or "no" factors. You can think of these criteria as an initial filter. An idea must meet all of these criteria to be considered further.

Filtering out the stuff we don’t want - Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

For example, I worked with an ambulance organisation to create a specification for vehicle equipment. Two binary criteria were: "Ability to be fully sterilised by the ambulance crew." and "Can be used whilst wearing gloves." You can see why, no matter how fancy, affordable, or high quality, a piece of equipment that doesn't meet both criteria just can't be entertained.

Flexible Criteria

Flexible criteria are the more nuanced factors that can be evaluated on a spectrum. These are the spaces where there is potential to have tradeoffs between criteria. Not completely meeting one doesn't rule something out, as it could over-perform in another important area, creating a net gain.

For example, when working with a pharmaceutical customer to create a brief for a digital product, two flexible criteria were "Can be scaled to provide value to as much of our patient base as possible". Another was "Provides a personalised experience to patients". These are flexible criteria because something could score highly on only one and still be a viable, valuable idea to discuss further.

In a nutshell - Creating good criteria

So now we know what good criteria are; here are the four stages of creating them, no matter the context. You can do this in 10 minutes to decide what to do with the kids at the weekend, or you can spend two days working on them to define success for your products next year in the market.

1. Lay out the intent of the criteria.

2. Create a range of potential criteria.

3. Separate them into binary and flexible criteria.

4. Review your flexible criteria and refine them to the 8-ish most important.

Example: a process for defining good criteria in 90 minutes

I'm going to take the pharmaceutical example above and expand it for you. This is the context: We have the steering committee for the division in the room. They are the people who will inform the intent of a digital product your team will be researching, designing and, hopefully, building. The CMO is also with us. It's her budget we're spending, and she is accountable for the project's success. That makes her the ultimate decision-maker. Even though she will likely delegate the product decisions and rely heavily on others' recommendations, it's her role to make the final call.

We have yet to determine what challenges the app will address, but we understand why the CMO has chosen to invest in the space and her intent for the project. She wants to capture the lower end of the market for a particular condition: people who can't afford regular treatment for their chronic illness and, therefore, need help managing acute treatment. (Side note - American healthcare is terrifying)

We'd spent the day learning about the business case and context from various stakeholders. Following this, I had 90 minutes on our agenda to define the strategic priorities for the digital product, followed by 30 minutes to prioritise them. This is how I planned the ninety minutes:

1. Clearly articulate the purpose of the criteria. Lay the challenge out clearly, ensuring all collaborators are on the same page regarding the intent of the decision. (5 minutes)

   1. Explain that a criterion is:

      1. Objective, meaning multiple people could assess something against the criteria and come to the same conclusion

      2. Measurable, meaning we could observe behaviour or review data to provide a barometer of assessment.

      3. Context-specific, meaning it is appropriate to the challenge being explored and isn't setting things up for failure. With the best will in the world, your new bubble tea flavour will not create world peace, but it might increase the amount of laughter in your store.

2. Hold a brainwriting session, asking all collaborators to silently write out potential criteria. (10 minutes)

   1. One idea per stickie and keeping it high-level at this point.

   2. Remind people they'll get to dive deeper into this during the discussion.

3. Bring all criteria together on one board, avoiding hierarchy. (20 minutes)

   

   Challenging a team on their language to make more meaningful criteria

   1. Go around the table and ask each person to share a single criterium.

   2. When they've read it out, take it and place it on the board.

   3. Ask if anyone else has something similar.

   4. Have those people read their post-its and gather them together in one place.

   5. Summerise the group into a high-level statement that conforms to the criteria rules, and capture detail where appropriate.

   6. Continue with the next person reading out a criterion.

4. Create your filter by separating the criteria into flexible and binary groups, ensuring that each binary criterion instantly excludes things assessed against it. (10 mins)

5. Review your flexible criteria, add detail and streamline where possible. (30 minutes)

   1. Every criterium should be distinct. If two criteria appear closely linked, they should be reassessed. You can use examples of what might be assessed with the criteria to force this conversation.

      1. If you use the same information to evaluate two criteria, can they be blended into one?

      2. If two criteria are different, rearticulate both until the group can express and understands the difference.

6. Create an "A" list of the most important criteria. (10 mins)

   1. You want to have at most 8 criteria in your flexible group, or you'll have too many variables when it comes to actually comparing options.

   2. Carefully review criteria, particularly ones that have not provoked conversation or were only identified by a single stakeholder.

   3. Try to move each to a secondary level of criteria titled something along the lines of "Important supplementary information." We should know answers to these things when it comes to comparing ideas, but we won't include them in any prioritisation matrices.

7. Review and walk through the criteria, ensuring the team has complete alignment on the wording and meaning of the criteria.

Following the session, I used the recording of the review to write up every single criterion along with the nuance of the conversations we'd had around it. Meaning that in future we could come back, read the criteria and understand exactly why we came to that conclusion and that wording.

That's it for today!

By ensuring you work with your collaborators to define good criteria, you'll take the first step towards avoiding miscommunication, misunderstandings, and the resulting poor decision-making.

I hope this article has helped you understand the importance of defining good criteria. Stay tuned for our next issue, where we'll discuss how to turn those criteria into a useful matrix for comparing ideas.

Until then, happy facilitating!