Is Decision Recycling Impacting Your Team?

Decisions are essential for teams to operate at a high level of performance. 

When decisions don’t stick (decision recycling), the overall cost of the team’s work increases due to re-work. Doing the same work multiple times is costly. 

Plus, few things adversely impact team morale like re-work.

Consider decision recycling on a capital project. Who enjoys spending weeks, or months, designing, calculating, procuring or constructing some aspect of a capital project, only to throw it out, or in the case of construction, rip it out, and start over?  

And when team morale is low, then the project’s quality, schedule, cost and safety are all at risk. 

One Owner company I consulted with prided itself on “being nimble”. Turns out “being nimble” was really code for “we like to frequently change our mind on decisions”.

By the time I was asked to help the Owner figure out their decision-making problem, the project team had lost all confidence in their leadership to make decisions stick and were joking about it like they did the weather - “just wait an hour and it will change.” 

The quickest way to reduce decision recycling (and improve the quality of decision making) is to get the right people involved in making decisions.

On capital projects, decision recycling often happens because Operations is not sufficiently involved in the decision-making process. The project team owes it to Operations to include them and Operations owes it to the project team to assign team members who can make a decision that won’t get overturned by someone else later. 

Is decision recycling impacting your team?