Decision Architecture in a Time of Compression

Introduction

Throughout our careers we have kept asking ourselves two questions: why organisations function the way they do, and why people do what they do inside them. An organisation puts people into a system so that it can steer them, and those same people then do things, or leave them undone, thanks to that system and in spite of it. Somewhere between the two is the point where both work, and it is rarely where anyone drew it. What we keep coming back to is how deciding actually works there: the daily and the strategic, the planned and the forced, the dossiers and the emotions, and how the people in those roles make their way through it.

We look at it through the CFO's eyes. The role is explicit about some things, finance first among them, and implicit about far more, because nearly everything in an organisation ends up in its financial wellbeing. The CFO is also the one asked to organise, test, guard and evolve the care with which the organisation decides. Reason, facts and content set the tone in that role, in work where so much happens between people and in the process: in what was agreed before the meeting, and in how a question was framed before anyone answered it. The articles are written for the CFO, though many of the challenges reach further, and leaders in other domains may recognise their own.

For years, people have told us to put our thoughts on paper, because it could inspire others. A year ago we did, starting with the research: what was high on the CFO's agenda, how AI was changing it, which challenges it brought and which it made sharper, and where that agenda runs into the CIO's and the transformation leader's. Then we checked it against our own work with the people who are trying to get something done within their mandate. What follows is what we have noticed from there, and the picture we have formed of what it means at the top.

Again and again, what we found came down to the system itself. By decision architecture we mean the system people have organised for taking decisions: the forums, the roles, the mandates and the business cycles, and the conviction behind them that this arrangement protects the organisation's interest and helps the people in it decide well. It is what keeps an organisation in motion, or fails to, and it evolves more slowly than the organisation it serves. In the meantime, the boundary between the line organisation and the project organisation has blurred, and with it the clarity about who decides. More and more of the reasoning behind an organisation's own decisions has come to rest on outside expertise, and now on AI.

The strain shows first in five places, one for each of the first five articles. Some of them we have been part of, on one side of the table or the other; others we recognise as new. The sixth article looks at what it takes to redesign decision architecture while the business keeps performing. That is new ground for most organisations, so there we looked to research on what the front-runners do. A year on, the first answers are coming in, and where we have learnt something along the way, we write it as learning, not as something we knew.

We are neither management scholars nor boardroom whisperers, and we claim no answers. We believe a challenge defined well is at least half of a solution, so each article spends most of its length on the challenge. Where we have watched people find a way through it, we say what they did. That is direction of thinking, no more. What works in one organisation can stall in the next, because it depends on the people there and what they have been through together, and on whether those who have to make it work have the experience it takes and a feel for that place.

All we hope is that the people who sit in leadership teams with an uneasy feeling recognise it here, and that something in it, even a single sentence, helps them make sense of a few things.