Why decisions never happen.

Almost every owner recognises the meeting where everyone agreed, the decision was written down, and three months later nothing had happened. The explanation usually lands on people not prioritising, which is convenient, since it places the problem somewhere else. In practice something quite concrete is almost always missing: time nobody freed up, knowledge nobody has, an asset nobody can get at, or a consequence that was never made clear. The odd part is that every single person involved can be perfectly reasonable, and it still stands still. At the end of this post you’ll find the five questions that make it happen.

Time, and the fact that nothing was taken away

The most common cause is also the dullest. The decision added work without removing anything, and the person handed the task had a full calendar before the meeting even started.

Then what always happens happens, which is that the new gives way to the old, because the old has customers who ring and the new only has a set of minutes. If something is going to happen, someone has to point out what that person should stop doing, or at least do less well for a while, and that’s precisely the sentence nobody wants to say out loud in the room.

Prioritising also sounds like an attitude, and it seldom is. It’s a schedule.

The knowledge nobody admits to lacking

The next cause is that nobody actually knows how the thing is done. It’s rarely said out loud, since it sounds like admitting you can’t do your job, so it gets described instead as not having had the time.

Often it isn’t a matter of learning a profession but of two hours with a tool you’ve never opened. Two hours nobody has, and that nobody has been asked to take either.

The key nobody can find

The third one is the most underrated, and it never shows up in a set of minutes. Something is needed to move forward, a login, a mandate, a piece of documentation or a person who knows, and nobody has it.

A company I worked with was going to change supplier for something they buy in. The new supplier needed access to a system the company already owned in order to get started. Nobody internally knew how that permission is granted, and nobody could find the login. The months went by, and the decision was made the whole time and not carried out the whole time.

What’s interesting is how it looked from the inside. I knew how it should be done but couldn’t get at the system. The person who had the access didn’t know how it’s passed on, and didn’t have the hours it took to hunt it down. Neither of us did anything wrong, and it still stood still, and all the while it was costing a month at a time.

The consequence that never comes

The fourth cause is that nothing happens if the thing doesn’t get done. A task with no consequence is in practice voluntary, and everyone involved works that out fairly quickly without anyone having to say it out loud.

Consequence here rarely means sanction, it means that someone can describe what it actually costs to leave it undone. A customer who can’t be delivered to, a cost that stays on the books, a supplier who can’t get going. If nobody can answer that question you’ve probably found something that didn’t need deciding at all, and that’s an answer worth having too.

This is where the old thesis belongs, that what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done. Follow-up is what makes the consequence real, and it doesn’t require a system: one and the same person asking after the same thing at the next meeting goes a long way. If, on the other hand, the task competes with things the person is genuinely measured on, billable hours or their own sales say, then what’s measured wins every time, and it’s entirely rational of them to let it.

That’s why it looks like unwillingness

What makes this hard to see is that the pieces sit in different people. One has the time, another the knowledge, a third the key, and none of them has all three.

Each of them is perfectly reasonable in their own corner, and none of them experiences themselves as the one holding anything up. From the outside it still looks like unwillingness, and that’s why the diagnosis “they aren’t prioritising” is so tempting and so seldom right.

This is also where this post parts company with Knoster’s model. Knoster is used after the fact on a change that has already got stuck, and points out which of five components is missing in the organisation. This is a question to ask in the moment, before you leave the room where the decision is being made, and it breaks what Knoster calls resources down into things you can point at: the hours, the know-how and the key.

Five questions before you leave the room

This is the whole post put into practice, and it takes two minutes per decision.

Who is responsible. A name, not a function and not a group. The management team isn’t a person, and we is definitely not a person.

When does it have to be finished. A date for when something is done, not for when it starts, since a start date can be pushed unnoticed while an end date shows when it’s passed.

What are the consequences if we don’t get it finished. If the answer is that nothing much happens, the decision is voluntary, and then it’s better to say so out loud than to let it sit in the minutes for a year.

How do we follow up. Who asks after it, and at which meeting. That’s the question that makes the consequence real, and it needs a name too.

What does the person responsible need in order to solve the task, and how do we make sure they get it. This is where the time, the knowledge and the access sit, which is to say what has to come out of the calendar, what the person needs to be able to do, and which login, which documentation or which mandate is required. It’s the question most often skipped over, and the only one that costs something to answer.

If you go through six months of minutes with those five questions and it’s the last one that’s missing time after time, then what you have isn’t a decision problem but an access problem that looks like a decision problem.

In practice

In Genomlysningen, our review of the business, we like to look at six months of meeting minutes, since the pattern is clearer in hindsight than in the moment. What usually turns up is that the same two or three questions have been decided several times over, and that what was missing was small every time.

That’s also what makes this sort of stoppage so hard to spot. A login, two hours and a mandate are too small to end up on an agenda, and quite big enough to hold up a decision for six months.