What we solve ·How do I fix the way we decide?
Vanguard · Guide
Do your reports produce decisions, or only meetings?
The committee gets forty pages every month and leaves without deciding anything.
That every page of your report forces a decision, or stops being produced.
Decision grade reportingSend this page to whoever decides
This sounds like you if
- In the committee, the discussion is about where the number came from, not what to do with it.
- The committee spends more time reviewing the data than deciding with it.
- A decision came late even though the data was already available.
Use this today, without hiring anyone
The associated decision test. Take your last committee pack and do this to it page by page; in an hour you will know how many pages of your pack support a decision and how many do not.
- Write in the margin which decision that page supports. If you cannot write it in one sentence, the page supports none.
- Mark the ones that only inform. Informing is fine, but not in the decision pack: those go into an annex nobody has to read in the meeting.
- Count how many are left. In a typical committee, six to eight of forty pages survive. That is your real report.
- For every indicator that survives, ask who defines it. If two areas calculate it differently, that indicator will consume half of your next meeting.
The change that pays the most costs nothing. Put what demands action first and what is context last. The typical report does the opposite, and that is why decisions get made in the final ten minutes.
How we solve it
The method, not the promise.
- The reports in circulation get inventoried and each one gets asked which decision it supports.
- Whatever supports none gets dropped, with the sign off of whoever was receiving it. This is the hard part and the part that is worth something.
- It gets redesigned around the decision, not around the area that produces the data.
- A single definition per indicator gets written, so that the argument about where the number came from ends.
- It gets adjusted after the first real committee, because the format gets tested in the room and not on paper.
What you receive
- The indicator dictionary, with one definition per indicator.
- The redesigned executive report, built in the tool you already use.
- The list of dropped reports, with the sign off of whoever was receiving them.
- One round of adjustment after the first real committee with the new format.
The proof that applies here
- Eight years of monthly operations reviews in front of senior leadership in a regulated environment.
- Statistical process control and Six Sigma Black Belt.
- Leading a 150 person operation where the report was the instrument of governance, not an annex.
Before you hire
If the source data is wrong, no redesign saves it: in that case that is the finding, and the next piece of work is a different one.
This looks like design work and it is not: the hard part is not how the page looks, it is deciding which pages stop being produced. That decision is carried by someone who chaired monthly reviews in front of senior leadership for eight years.
Of the pages in your last committee pack, how many can you tie to one specific decision?
If the problem is a different one