Decision-Making Process & Meeting Types

Introduction

Decision-making is a sore spot in many organizations. Too much input, too little input, unclear who decides and who gets a say, endlessly striving for consensus, making decisions too quickly or slowly, communicating the decision poorly (or not at all).

Organizations hold meeting after meeting to discuss decisions, but often leave those meetings without making them. At the root of many of these challenges:

not properly scoping the work involved in making a decision
failing to clarify which decision-making phase you’re in

The decision-making phases outlined below are the typical arc in most decision-making processes, even when no one has named them explicitly. If you are responsible for moving a decision forward, this guide will help you name where you are in the process, clarify what work needs to happen next, and use meeting time more intentionally.

How this guide connects to meetings

Every phase requires asynchronous work outside of meetings and you don’t need a meeting for every phase. Throughout, I’ve added guidance for how to bring a decision at this stage to a meeting and why.

I am not recommending you hold seven different meetings to make every decision. I am inviting you to stop using a vague agenda topic, “Discuss X decision,” for very different types of work, and instead design the meeting based on the phase you’re actually in.

You decide whether a meeting is needed based on the dynamics in your organization, the stakes of the decision, and the kind of alignment needed at each step along the way.

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How to use this guide

Name the decision you are trying to move forward
Name the phase you are actually in
Ask: “What work needs to happen before we can move to the next phase?”
Decide whether that work needs a meeting, async input, and/or one person drafting something
If you are bringing it to a meeting, use the guidance in each section’s meeting notes to design the next agenda

Database Example

To make the phases more concrete, I’ll refer to this example throughout the rest of this guide:

An organization is deciding whether and how to adopt a new database tool.

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1. Identify when a decision is needed

Sometimes this happens in a meeting: someone asks a question, someone shares a concern or issue. Other times a team member identifies a problem or challenge and recognizes what they do next will have implications for others or they need others’ input before taking the next step. These are all early signs a decision is needed.

Once you identify the organization will need to make a decision, it’s a good time to pause and ask someone to scope the process (or scope it yourself!).

Database Example (Continued) </aside>

2. Scope process

To scope your decision-making process, write out the following: