Has remote working caused decision-making in your organization to speed up or stall?
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Sometimes when we get into these cultures of innovation, we drive this message that in order to innovate, you have to be able to decide to go do something. And that works for you and against you. I did work at Yahoo back in the day and at that period of time, it was insane. Everybody thought they owned the decision. I was like, what kind of company is this?
Ralph Laura recently said, "At the beginning of COVID, we were all talking about how decisions were being accelerated but we were wrong. In fact, decisions are now taking longer." He said that decisions that would otherwise get made in the hallway are no longer getting made because there's no hallway and now we have to schedule all these meetings. And when this came up in the conversation, everybody agreed that it is actually now taking longer for decisions to get made, which was surprising.
Ralph said that it got to the point where they created a flowchart for decision-making within the company but unfortunately such flowcharts don’t work because the decision-making process for somebody in finance or in HR may be dramatically different to somebody in engineering. A standard communications framework across the organization is a challenge to implement. The only way it actually works is to drive it down into the organization and empower teams with specific guardrails.
There's still an issue with always asking for more and more input as opposed to closing on a decision and just saying, "No, we're not going to do that anymore, this is how it is going to be." I think those are the things that hang up a lot of this transformation more than anything, the inability to make a decision on some of these things.
Because many people would accept it if somebody said, “We're going to implement this, this way.” It's interesting. I do think we say that people don't want to change, but there are others that just don't want to make a decision about the change.