Decision (Involvement) Depth: What level of involvement with others is optimal?
Reading time: 4 mins
Summary: How much involvement is optimal in a decision from those you work with? How do others best leverage you? How do you best leverage others? Decision (involvement) depth is one framework to help.
Decision (Involvement) Depth:
Levels:
L1: Don't know about the decision. Make the decision and don’t let others know.
L2: FYI of the decision in an email that takes <15 mins to read for those FYI’d.
L3: Minimum input: ~1 hour total likely in a meeting.
10-25 mins of 'getting up the curve' explaining the circumstances and recommended course of action (decision) in a meeting by presentation, amazon 6 pager or something similar.
Then discussion and input from others in the meeting for the remainder of the hour.
How well you get people up the curve is key :).
One framework: 10 mins on 'diagnosis', 10 mins on 'prescription' giving the context needed as well as assurances that nothing is missing to get to a high quality decision.
Input Types form others:
Suggestion = Take or leave the input from eg your manager. No need to let them know what you do.
Recommendation = Take or leave the input from eg your manager but you need to let them know what you decided and why.
Expectation = Either go ahead with the ‘expectation’ from eg your manager; or if you don’t think the input makes sense then say so, however before moving ahead have a discussion to get sign off with eg your manager.
L4: Want to go deeper than 1 hour.
How much deeper depends. You can go as deep as you want!
For a CEO, head of department, manager, peer; normally they have 1-3 things they want to be going deeper on at any given point.
But the vast majority of things are optimal for L1-L3 involvement.
Comment
I find that talking to others and figuring out what the optimal level of input is for different decisions is very important. IE explicitly discuss which of the four levels is best.
The more confidence someone has built normally the greater the autonomy they have.
Also, for the most important things it’s best to get a ‘2nd opinion’. So only try to have others ‘L4: Go deeper’ if it’s important.
Thoughts on ways to ‘L4 go deeper’.
Outcome = 1. Diagnosis + 2. Prescription
1. Diagnosis
Level of work to build / understand diagnosis:
L1: Originate yourself. 10+ hours using product, looking at quant data, speaking to customers for qual, etc.
L2: Do ~10% the time of 'L1: Using product looking at quant data, speaking to customers, etc' as L1 person can guide L2 person what to do, but hopefully get 80% of the understanding (ie the important data points) and then build own view on diagnosis. ~1 hour
L3: Review diagnosis synthesis in ~10 mins and thereby ask questions and have discussion in a meeting.
What is needed so that I understand what i'm looking at? EG do I need to speak to customers? EG do I need to have reviewed product?
L4: Don't see the diagnosis.
Comment
How well you can help people go deeper is crucial.
How well you can show your analysis and synthesis is super important too! A couple of blogs on Amazon 6 pagers:
I find that often you need to show people through other products and have them actually see the experience. Not sure this can be done in an Amazon 6 pager.
2. Prescription
Level of work to understand prescription
L1: Originate myself. 1-10 hours of analysis of diagnosis to make a prescription.
L2: Do 10-100% the time of 'L1: analysis' as walk through of someone else’s L1 thinking, then build your own prescription. ~1 hour
L3: Review prescription synthesis in ~10 mins and thereby ask questions and have discussion in a meeting.
What is needed so that I understand what I'm looking at? EG do I need to speak to customers? EG do I need to have reviewed product?
L4: Don't see the prescription.
If you only take away one thing
Normally you are trying to maximise what a company can do well.
You can’t have everyone know everything, then you can only do as much as what one person can know.
The opposite of depth is leverage. Normally you want the minimum depth that allows a good outcome. I don’t want to know as much as possible about what is going on, I want to know as little as possible that allows a good outcome. But also for the most important areas, you normally want a second opinion on what to do.
‘T’ shaped understanding: I want to be shallow in most places, and deep only where I need to be.
Jingle: Does Duncan have depth? In most places no ;)!