Essay

The Anatomy of Decisions*

Owners, lead times, deferrals and overrides: the working parts of a planning cycle

* With thanks to Joseph Story of o9 Solutions for the phrase.

Planning processes are among the best-documented objects in any organisation. There are swim lanes, RACI charts, cadence calendars and templates for every meeting. The decisions inside those processes get far less attention.

Try a small experiment at the close of your next planning cycle. Ask what it decided. Not what it reviewed, discussed, aligned on or took away as an action: decided. Which numbers changed? Who changed them? Who owned the changes? Were they carried out?

Some plans are just plans. This essay is about how they become decisions.

A planning cycle exists to support a set of decisions before their lead times expire. The first essay in this series argued that the decision, not the plan, is the deliverable of a planning process. If that is accepted, the decisions deserve at least as much scrutiny as the plan, and they rarely get it.

Herbert Simon taught us that people take decisions they know to be suboptimal because information is scarce, late, and more than the mind can process. Bounded rationality is a general condition. Where the bounds lie is different in every organisation, and finding them takes a method. Mine is to take the decisions apart the way an anatomist would: the organs first, then the pathologies, then the physiology.

In the essay

• The four properties of a planning decision, and the one-page register
• Decision debt: deferred, defaulted, and taken by the calendar
• The anatomy of a gap: the different problems inside “adoption is low”
• Reversibility, verifiability, consequence: how much to delegate to the machine
• Overrides as data, and the review that learns from them