- Examining the Decision-Making Process
- Boyd and the Decision Process
- The OODA Loop
- The Ingredients of Decision Making
- The Pathway to Improved Decision Making
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Pathway to Improved Decision Making
We have discussed how the quality of decisions is dependent upon the strength of our understanding of the problems and desired outcome, the friction in our decision process, our level of situational awareness, and our ability to learn. We have also covered many of the ways that each of these key elements can degrade. How can we begin to improve our own decision-making abilities?
As you probably could have guessed by now, the journey is not as simple as following a set of predefined practices. We have to first dig deeper into how we go about making decisions and answer the following questions:
Do you and your teammates understand your customer’s target outcomes? Do you know why they are important. Do you have a good idea for how to measure that you are on track to reaching them?
What factors in your ecosystem are causing rework, misalignments, and other issues that add friction that slows down and makes your decision-making and delivery processes inefficient?
How does the information you and your teammates need to gain situational awareness flow across your ecosystem? Where is it at risk of degrading, and how do you know when it is happening and its potential impact on your decision making?
How effectively does your organization learn and improve? Where are the weak points, and what effect are they having on your decision-making effectiveness?
Effective DevOps implementations not only can answer these questions with ease, but can tell you what is being done to fix any challenge the team faces. Each implementation journey is different, and there is no one answer for what is right.
This book takes the same approach.
If you think you have a good grasp of the service delivery problem space and are ready to dive straight into practical application, you can jump ahead to Section 3. In those chapters I have written a number of techniques and approaches that I have used in numerous organizations large and small and found extremely helpful for everyone across the organization.
However, if you are like me, you may feel that you need to understand a bit more about the thinking behind this approach to feel more comfortable with it before making any serious commitment. This deep dive begins with Chapter 3, “Mission Command,” in the next section.