Improve Decision Cadence
12 weeks · 4 milestones
Milestone map
Milestone map
3 milestones
Decision cadence failures take three forms: decisions made too slowly (the team waits for a meeting that hasn't been scheduled), decisions made without the right people (someone with essential context is excluded), or decisions that are made but not recorded (the decision is revisited in a future meeting because no canonical record exists). The baseline must name which failure type dominates with specific incidents, and commit to a structural intervention — a new meeting rhythm, a decision log, a DACI or RACI framework, or a clear decision-rights specification — before implementation begins.
Proof required
Submit: (1) a decision failure log: at minimum 5 specific decisions made in the past 6–8 weeks that exemplify the dominant failure type — for each, name the decision, the delay or error, and the cost; (2) a root cause diagnosis (200 words minimum): which of the three failure types dominates (too slow, wrong people, no record), and what specific structural gap causes it; (3) a pre-committed structural intervention — the specific decision-making change to be implemented (e.g. 'a weekly 30-minute decision log review meeting replacing ad-hoc decision requests' or 'a DACI template for all decisions affecting more than one team, with a 48-hour async comment window before implementation') — written before implementation.
What gets checked
- Decision failure log entries are specific and dated — 'we sometimes don't decide fast enough' is not an incident; '2026-06-12: a vendor contract decision waited 3 weeks for a monthly exec review meeting, during which the preferred vendor was acquired' is an incident
- Failure type diagnosis matches the evidence — if the log shows 4 of 5 incidents are 'no record' failures (decision was re-litigated because no record existed), the diagnosis must be 'no record', not 'too slow'; the diagnosis must be the one the evidence most supports
- Pre-committed intervention is structural and specific — 'we will communicate decisions better' is not a structural intervention; 'we will use a DACI template for all decisions touching more than one team, stored in the team wiki, with a named decision-maker and a rationale section' is a structural intervention
Resources
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Google re:Work — Decision Quality Research
Go further: the research basis for why decision quality (not speed) is the predictor of team performance.
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