Five Keys to Organisational Decision-Making

1. Make Long-Term Goals – and use them to Measure Your Decisions

All too often organisations find themselves endlessly running around in pursuit of short-term goals. Money that has been committed to a year-long project gets overrun or set off because flashy or short-term priorities arise, and resources are redirected. As a result, you typically end up with an awful lot of confusion and a lack of overall progress.

To avoid this problem, nail down your high-priority, long-term goals from the outset. Then as your organisation makes decisions, ask yourself whether what you’re doing aligns with those goals. This should be a constant process, returning again and again to check your organisational activity against your goals.

When you apply this method successfully, you will engage more reliably in short-term projects that support your long-term goals. Over time, this will push your organisation forward.

2. Align Your Goals with Your Core Values

The previous item raises a new question: how do you decide on your long-term goals? Ideally, these should flow from your organisation’s mission and core values. Your organisation’s goals may evolve over time, but its values should be much less mutable.

Your organisational values confer a coherent sense of identity and continuity to your organisation. They should be clearly understood and agreed upon by your decision-makers. As you evaluate your goals, make sure that they are aligned with your core values.

3. Assess (and Reassess) your Spending

One way to evaluate your priorities as they are being realized today is to take a look at your spending. Often, you may think you’re prioritising a particular goal or effort, while your budget tells a different story.

Make sure your organisational spending reflects your identified priorities. If not, you need to take a second look. And as with any such check-in, it’s essential to make this a regular assessment to continuously verify that you’re on track.

4. Understand the Impacts of your Decisions

Some decisions may be discrete and routine, having neat boundaries and only significantly impacting the matter directly at hand. But more often, organisational decisions may have wide-ranging consequences, especially if they touch on policy or processes.

As your organisation considers varying possibilities, make sure to weight second- and third-order effects. These consequences can provide crucial context for the decision at hand.

5. Remember your Personnel

Organisations tend to depend on the quality of their employees to succeed. If your decisions make it difficult for your employees to be productive in their work environment, it will damage your prospects for long-term success – even if your decisions appear to advance a short-term goal.

Evaluate the effect your decisions will have on your employees’ ability to perform their jobs and factor this component into your decisions accordingly.

The most effective decision-making should lead to improved work toward your long-term goals, which should be driven by core values. You should constantly re-evaluate your spending and assess likely consequences of your actions. If you follow these steps thoroughly, you will have assembled a framework for successful organisational decision-making.