How to Run a Decision-Making Meeting
Decision-making meetings have the potential to become minor wars. By considering elements in the right order, you’ll make your decisions much more smoothly.
Meetings, I just love meetings!
No…I don’t. I hate meetings. One of my clients was lamenting that decision-making meetings take forever. They’re the worst. Everyone has a favorite point of view and won’t budge. I’ve recently discussed preparing for decision-making meetings by using behind-the-scenes negotiations.
But you also need strategies to run the meeting itself. Doing the right things in the right order will save lots of time, heartache, and cleaning expenses. It’s not cheap to get blood stains out of the carpet.
Bernice’s plant store, Green Growing Things, is doing so well that she wants to expand. But Bernice, Europa, and Melvin held can’t agree on the next location. Tackling the decision in order will help them reach a decision quickly.
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Start with Goals
Two paths diverged in the woods. One goes to Heck, the other goes to Nirvana. The roads lead to different destinations and they offer different journeys. The road to Heck is paved with good intentions, while the road to Nirvana smells like teen spirit. With no goal in mind, either road will do. You can just flip a coin. But the reason you’re making a decision is because you either care about where you’ll end up, or you care about the journey to get there. Otherwise, you’d just flip a coin.
You’re in a decision-making meeting because you each have a goal. First agree on the goals. Otherwise, no other part of decision-making will even make sense.
Bernice’s goal is a lifestyle business that’s fun to run and makes a decent living. Europa’s goal is complete and utter economic domination of the Western world. Leaving these goals unstated keeps the discussion going in circles. By stating and discussing their individual goals, all parties can eventually agree on the main goal. Europa came around to Bernice’s point of view and the goal became a fun, lifestyle business. As Bernice later explained it, “It’s good to be the majority shareholder.”
Agree on Framing
You have your goal, now frame the specific decision. Framing is deciding how to express the decision. The goal is a lifestyle business. The decision is about location. We could frame it several ways:
Where can we locate a store to build a community of plant lovers?- Where can we sell the largest number of plants?
- Where can we best serve customers?
Where can we locate a store to build a community of plant lovers?How we frame the decision determines the options we’ll consider. “Where can we locate a store?” sends us out to analyze neighborhoods and rents. “Where can we sell the largest number of plants?” sends us to look at different distribution channels, one of which might be retail stores. “Where can we best serve customers?” sends us looking at customer wants. The group decided that for a lifestyle business, a retail store with an in-person community is best. So they agreed to ask, “Where can we locate the store to build a community?”
Choose Criteria
After framing, the group decides on criteria. Criteria are used to compare options against other. When choosing a car, price and gas mileage are two criteria we might care about. Suitability for carpooling in a post-apocalyptic world is a criterion we might not care about. Since the framing is set, everyone will choose criteria related to the same framing, finding a retail location for a plant community. The group quickly agreed on relevant criteria: walk-in traffic, monthly rent, and convenient garbage disposal. (The Audrey 2 nursery seems to fill several trash bags each night.)
Agree on Process
Next, agree on how the decision will be made. How will you decide which option wins? You can try for unanimous agreement. You can choose majority vote. You can try a non-benevolent dictatorship.
Next, agree on how the decision will be made. How will you decide which option wins? You can try for unanimous agreement. You can choose majority vote. You can try a non-benevolent dictatorship: one person hands down a decision from On High and everyone else has to suck it up and live with it. You can also choose a benevolent dictatorship where the benevolent dictator listens, before making the decision.
Whatever process you choose, agree up front. Some decisions may call for unanimous agreement, while others may best be done as a decision by the owner. When people agree on process first, then even if that process chooses an option some people don’t like, they’ll usually agree to abide by the decision. Even though she’s the majority shareholder, Bernice has suggested that the location decision be unanimous. This is a lifestyle business and we want to keep our team together and happy. So we want everyone to agree with the decision, even if it takes longer to get full agreement.
Identify Options
At last, the process work is done! It’s time to start generating options. You want to find options after choosing the decision criteria and process. If you do it in the other order, you risk having your choice of criteria or process biased by the options on the table. You don’t want to choose criteria and process to fit your options, you want to find options that fit a high-quality set of criteria and a good decision process. You’ll get better options if you have each person list ideas separately, then share them together. If you brainstorm as a group, the options you get will cluster around one set of ideas.
For example, Bernice wants a country storefront, Melvin favors a downtown location, and Europa is convinced the suburbs are the route to world domination…er, I mean, building a satisfying lifestyle business.
Decide
Finally, evaluate the options using the criteria you’ve chosen. Then use your agreed-upon process to make your choice. After much discussion, the group agreed that the decision criteria—walk-in traffic, monthly rent, and convenient disposal of the mysterious Audrey 2 trash bags—were only satisfied by the downtown Financial District option. Melvin piped up, “Plus we’re doing good for the world by locating the Audrey 2 nursery by the Goldman Sachs parking garage.” I have no idea what he’s talking about, but then, his brother Seymour would also occasionally come out with non-sequitors. I just nod and smile. It makes life easier.
Conclusion
What makes life easier is running streamlined decision meetings. Start with your larger level goals and agree on how you’ll frame the decision. Choose your decision criteria and agree on your decision-making process. Identify your options, and then and only then, decide. Doing things in this order will help you keep meetings to a minimum and decisions to a maximum. You just might save enough time to go out for a picnic somewhere that’s green.
For more tips on how to spend less time in meetings and more time actually doing things, check out Get-It-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.Â
