Archives

— Temporary notes, will be removed —

• Someone notices a problem or opportunity and takes the initiative, or alerts someone better placed to do so.
• Prior to a proposal, the decision-maker may seek input to sound out perspectives before proposing action.
• The initiator makes a proposal and seeks advice from those affected or those with expertise.
• Taking this advice into account, the decision-maker decides on an action and informs those who have given advice.

1. She stated an intention
2. She collected feedback (and responded to concerns)
3. She made the decision
4. and communicated and recorded it adequately.

• Taking this advice into account, the decision-maker decides on an action and informs those who have given advice.

What if the process hasn’t been respected

Process:

1. Share your intention (question, solution, etc.).
2. Collect feedback/seek advice from impacted people and experts.
3. Iterate on the solution (go back to 2).
4. Make the decision.
5. Inform others by documenting it and communicating.

Archived principles

• The success of the company drives us.
• We make sure we gather feedback from everyone who the decision will impact before it is made.
• The person who makes the decision is the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for the discussed topic.
• We make decisions based on data (metrics, benchmarks, etc.) to make informed and relevant choices.
• We seek consent-based decisions.
• We don’t necessarily try to reach a consensus as it drastically slows down the process.
• At least 3 people should participate in every decision. That way, we make smarter decisions and share a load of a mistake (being the only person responsible for a mistake causes a lot of stress and lowers risk-taking and allowance for failures).
• It's important to internalize how irreversible, fatal, or non-fatal a decision may be. Very few can't be undone.
• We allow ourselves to make mistakes. But we don’t allow ourselves to do two times the same mistake.
• We’re deeply driven by the belief that fast decisions are far better than slow ones and radically better than no decisions.
• If we strongly disagree, we have a bigger problem: we’re not aligned on priorities (results, values, etc.), we don’t trust others, or the owner of the decision is not clearly defined.
• Even when a decision is made, everyone can share their opinion on everything. It doesn’t mean we’ll agree, but we’ll listen.
• Even if several people are consulted, the person who takes the decision is the accountable person (see RACI and RAM sections below).

In practice

We track and store decisions in the Decision Backlog in Notion. However, discussions don’t happen in Notion (too many notifications, not the ideal tool to chat) but in Slack. For each decision: we create a dedicated Slack channel with a name starting with decision- (eg. decision-benefits-portugal) and refer to it.

Summary:

• Create a document in the Decision Backlog (Notion), using the template.
• Fill in the properties and content.
• Create a decision- Slack channel.
• Add the link to the Notion document.

If a decision has been made throughout a conversation in a non-dedicated Slack channel, we store the link of the discussion to the Notion document anyway.