A 4-Step Process to Help Senior Teams Prioritize Decisions

Harvard Business Review has featured an article from Strategic Decisions Group partner Peter Hopper, who leads the firm’s Asia operations, and his colleague Jugnu Sakuja. Their article, “A 4-Step Process to Help Senior Teams Prioritize Decisions,” discusses how senior leaders and their teams can benefit from an approach that treats decisions as a deliberately structured workstream.

Using the example of their client company, a footwear manufacturer, Hopper and Sakuja explore how a culture of firefighting had developed where decisions were treated in isolation or in response to day-to-day developments in the business. Moreover, managers and teams were unsure who owned what decisions, constantly kicking them upstairs and putting more demands on the senior team.

The senior team embarked on an exercise to create a repeatable process for prioritizing decisions and determining the right methodology for each. The four-step process produced a clear decision agenda and, with a mechanism in place for characterizing decisions in terms of organizational and analytical complexity, the team can treat future decisions as a workflow, which they can periodically review and update. Further, by defining the most efficient and effective process for dealing with each decision, the senior team can free more time for attention to strategic, high-impact decisions.