Tag: decisive action

Use AI to Turn Meetings into Action

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My friend Irwin reminded me today of two things:

  1. How good it feels to figure something out
  2. How dangerous that good feeling can be

Meaning, if you’re a thoughtful, analytical, caring person, there’s a significant psychological payoff in diagnosing something correctly.

Imagine this:

  • There’s something not quite right going on in your company / organization (someone is unhappy, some process isn’t working, some results are off)
  • You and a colleague or two get together to figure out what’s what
  • You have a great conversation and unearth important things
  • Voila! You come up with real clarity on what’s wrong and what needs to happen

That’s all great, but be careful about how good that “Voila!” feels.

What happens next, for many of us, is that we jump to the next thing: another meeting, another task.

And the risk isn’t simply that we’ll lose some of the texture or nuance of the clarity we had in the meeting, though that often happens.

The risk is the fact that the meeting feels like success. We got to the answer!

At the extreme, a great conversation that leads to no action is literally worthless.

Even if you don’t fall into this trap, is it possible that the psychological reward of experiencing that insight and clarity lead you to do 70%, or 60%, or 50% of what you need to do? Could it be less?

If so, I have a proposal for you.

  1. Start by scheduling differently. For any problem-solving meeting, keep the hour after the meeting free / scheduled for just you.
  2. In addition (optional), record the meeting with an AI tool. (You decide your comfort level with this; I’ve found it very helpful.) In addition, take whatever notes you’d normally take during the meeting.
  3. At the start of your scheduled hour after the meeting, go to your paid AI tool of choice. While everything is still 100% fresh in your mind, speak (not type) freely to the tool. What’s the problem you were trying to solve? What were the specific issues you worked through? What solutions did you come up with? Talk as you would talk to a colleague who would want to understand all the ins and outs. Lots of detail. All the little juicy bits. Everything.
  4. Finally, take that text and ask the AI to summarize what you’ve told it. Ask it to give you a well-defined structure: headline problem statement; detailed issues that were discussed; proposed solutions.

(Here’s a starter prompt: What I just described is the output of a 90 minute problem-solving meeting. Take that detail and write a structured summary of the headline problem, sub-issues, and all proposed solutions. Be as detailed as possible. Before you start, make sure to ask me for any additional context you need and/or any clarifying questions. I want you to be confident you understand everything I’m saying and my proposed solution.)

These steps—from your input to the first AI output—shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes: you talk for ~5 minutes, write a prompt, respond to questions from the AI tool, get the first summary. Now the fun begins.

Read the output the tool has given you and start working with and through the AI.

You might say/write things like “this point you made wasn’t quite right: [quote the point]. Here’s why:” and explain it in more detail. Do this both for things the AI didn’t explain well and for areas where reading the summary helps you see gaps you didn’t see before. Keep at it until you have a document you’re satisfied with. This step can easily take 30 minutes or more.

Once you’re mostly satisfied with the content, structure, tone, and detail, you’re ready to put the finishing touches on the document.

I find myself consistently asking the AI to be a more specific with its points / language / descriptions, and I inevitably go into the document and edit some parts myself. I also always ask for specific next steps, a timeline/workplan for all parties involved, and a 1-2 page executive summary.

Voila! again, but now your best thinking is turned into a detailed action plan. With this approach, you’re:

  1. Capturing, and acting on, that beautiful moment of insight you have at the end of a great meeting
  2. Seeing what a professional summary of those insights looks like, so you can make it better
  3. Forcing yourself to engage in further brainstorming to refine your idea
  4. Creating clear next steps and a timeline
  5. Documenting it all in ways that makes it easier for everyone to act

If before you were acting on 50% of your best thinking from the meeting, this approach gives you 150% or more.

Good Decision-Making

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Ultimately, our job as leaders boils down to a few things. Having a vision and strategy that is shared, understood, motivating and that inspires action. Creating a great culture. Hiring and supporting great people. And, maybe less obvious, creating an organization that’s good at making decisions.

It turns out that there’s a very high correlation between organizational effectiveness and the quality of organizational decision-making. And the best, most actionable article I’ve found on understanding the quality of an organization’s decision-making says it’s function of:

  • Speed: how fast do you decide?
  • Effort: how much work goes in to making decisions?
  • Quality: how good are the decisions?
  • Yield: how well do you turn decisions into actions?

As someone who’s transitioned from the non-profit to the for-profit sector, my experience is that non-profit organizations typically decide more slowly and with more effort, all without resulting in consistently high(er) quality / higher yield decisions.

I think this is a function of the more multi-faceted accountability in the non-profit world (multiple criteria for success, multiple stakeholders). This in turn leads to slow(er), high(er)-effort decision-making which begets a culture that accepts slower, higher-effort decision-making, even when it’s not always needed.

This is not to say that faster is always better: speed is not useful if we make lots of quick, poor decisions.

Indeed, one of our jobs as leaders is to consistently walk the line of always moving quickly while managing to get the right input from the right people, so that decisions are (mostly) high quality.

The nuance is that how we decide develops into a cultural norm: people watch how decisions get made, learn that behavior by osmosis, and replicate whatever your decision-making culture is.

For example, is it OK in your organization to:

  • Make decisions without formal authority?
  • Change a decision after it’s been made? After the deadline?
  • Leave a decision-making meeting without a decision getting made?
  • Have a more junior person be the decision-making in a meeting with someone more senior?
  • Make a decision that is not documented?
  • Make a decision that doesn’t turn into action?
  • Be unclear who the decision-maker is on a given topic?
  • Have one decision-maker?
  • Have many decision-makers?

While there’s no right answer to any of these questions, my view is that organizational growth creates complexity, and complexity slows things down and allows people to hide.

That’s why most of the time, most organizations would benefit from faster decisions being made by fewer people who take more ownership around being “the decider.”

One helpful way to jumpstart these conversations is by starting to frame decisions as either Type 1 (irreversible, make them very deliberately) or Type 2 (reversible, prioritize speed). You’ll quickly discover that most decisions are Type 2, and that just might give you the freedom to move faster on them.

One final thought: one of the easiest ways to lead, no matter where you sit in an organization, is by choosing, today, to make more decisions without triple-checking if it’s OK. The worst thing that will happen is that you’ll discover that deciding really isn’t allowed (which is important information). The best thing is that more people will start turning to you to decide more things, because you had the courage to step up in the first place.

Crisis Speed

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

There was a moment, not long after we incorporated 60 Decibels, when I was sitting in the office with my head of operations. We had to decide which of a number of office spaces we had seen was right for us, and what lease to sign.  We discussed it for about five minutes, agreed what we wanted to do…and then we both just stopped for a beat.

Both of us paused because it felt like we needed to check with someone else, to get an additional approval, to run it up the flagpole.

But in a startup, blessedly, there is no flagpole.

Both of us got a bit giddy as we realized it was just up to us. When the surrounding silence made this abundantly clear, we confirmed our decision and moved on. That was the first of a thousand small decisions we made quickly.

She and I had both spent our careers in bigger organizations. We’d learned about things going slowly. It had been, slowly and surely, pounded in to us.

Of course things change in moments of crisis–like what we’re living through right now. When a crisis hits, we all move faster, because what’s happening externally is so big and so universally understood that no one will punish us for choosing to act.

The question that presents itself is: why only in a crisis?

One of the many things we are all learning is that we can up our game when we have to: we can make important decisions and own the consequences.

The people whose job it is to make sure everything is just right have other things to worry about right now. Or they’ve consciously changed their standard, tilting far in favor of action and away from methodically checking off all the boxes.

This has happened because we all understand the cost of inaction in a crisis.

What we shouldn’t forget, not just today but also in a calmer tomorrow, is that the cost of inaction is always high.

Many of us have learned that we can’t get blamed for doing nothing. But the much more important lesson is that inaction and passing the buck are nearly always the most expensive thing–not just because of the things we don’t get done, but because of the culture we build and the lessons we teach our best people:

That’s it’s not really up to them to decide.

That they’re not really on the hook.

That we don’t, when you boil it all down, trust them to act in our best interest.

What could be more damaging to the cultures we aim to build?