Decide. Inform. Assure: How to Improve Important Decisions

A pile of good ingredients is not yet a decision

I’ve been thinking about the manager who sits in the middle of important decisions.

Finance brings the numbers. Technical specialists bring their advice. Others contribute risks, stakeholder views, legal considerations, strategic context and implementation requirements.

Each contribution might be perfectly good. But a pile of good ingredients is not yet a sandwich.

Someone has to layer them together. They need to decide what belongs, what is missing, what doesn’t belong and what the person making the decision genuinely needs to know.

I’ve started thinking of that person as the Sandwich Chef.
It is a slightly ridiculous metaphor, but it describes a serious organisational role.

The Sandwich Chef isn’t responsible for producing every ingredient but they do create a gourmet lunch that a customer will enjoy. Their job is integration. They turn individual contributions into a coherent recommendation that someone else can understand, test and ultimately approve.

When that integration is weak, organisations often compensate by producing more. Much like hiding bad flavours with extra relish or salt.

More analysis. More consultation. More pages. More review. More rewriting. Everyone works harder, yet the decision does not necessarily become clearer. More often than not, a ham and cheese toastie is better than a salad sandwich on a cold winters day.

Here’s a simple way to create a sandwich that they want to eat:

Decide. Inform. Assure.

Decide: start with the decision

Ham and Cheese, tomato if you got it! Sprinkle of salt and pepper too, please.

Once the decision is clear that you want a sandwich, we need to know what goes in it. Organisations usually have plenty of information. The challenge is determining which information matters to this decision and helping the decision maker understand its significance.

More mustard doesn’t make a sandwich better and more evidence does not automatically create a stronger recommendation. Sometimes it just creates a longer one.

The Sandwich Chef needs to know when an ingredient strengthens the whole and when it simply makes the sandwich harder to eat.

This is particularly important when specialists are contributing to a decision. Their role is rightly to understand their area in depth. The person integrating the decision has a different responsibility: to make those different forms of expertise useful to the person exercising judgement.

The question changes from:

What information do we have?
to:
What does the decision maker need to know?

That distinction can remove a surprising amount of unnecessary work.

Assure: find the awkward questions early

Are you allergic to anything?
A coherent recommendation is not necessarily a robust one. Before it moves upwards, someone needs to challenge it.

Are important assumptions visible? Does the evidence support the conclusion? Have credible alternatives been considered? What would a board member challenge? This is assurance.

A relatively small amount of challenge at this stage can prevent another complete cycle of review and rewriting later.

Integration is the work

Decide, Inform and Assure are deliberately simple.
The person integrating an important decision needs to keep coming back to three questions:

Are we clear about what needs to be decided?
Have we given the decision maker what they need to exercise judgement?
Have we tested the recommendation enough for it to hold up?

Those questions shift attention away from document production and towards decision quality and a delicious sandwich.