Dr. Neil's Notes
General > People
Decision-Making That Travels
Introduction
Decisions made in a vacuum, or escalated endlessly upward, are a tax on the organisation. Every decision that climbs to a leader who does not need to be making it, is time lost, confidence eroded, and a signal to the team that they are not trusted to act. In a globally distributed team, where time zones add delay to every escalation, that tax compounds quickly.
The question worth asking is not how to make better decisions at the top. It is how to build the conditions in which good decisions get made at every level, regardless of who is online.
Clarifying Who Decides
One of the most common sources of friction I have observed in distributed teams is not disagreement about decisions. It is confusion about who has the right to make them. When that is unclear, people either escalate when they should act, or act when they should consult. Both outcomes are expensive.
Making decision rights explicit does not need to be bureaucratic. It can be as simple as agreeing, for each major category of decision, who owns it, who needs to be consulted, and who needs to be informed. The specific framework matters less than the fact that everyone understands it. The best framework is the one the team can actually remember and use.
Writing Decisions Down
In a co-located team, a lot of institutional memory lives in hallway conversations and the ambient noise of being in the same room. That does not exist in a distributed team. If a decision is not written down, it does not exist for the colleague coming online eight hours later.
A good decision record is short. It captures what was decided, why, what alternatives were considered, and who owns it. Including named individuals rather than roles can be important as it anchors accountability to real people at the point the decision was made. It should also note whether the decision is easy to reverse, and what would prompt a revisit. A decision record with no trigger for reviewing it becomes a graveyard of settled questions. Add a review trigger, and it becomes living governance.
Type 1 and Type 2 Decisions
Not all decisions deserve the same weight. A useful distinction, popularised by Amazon and widely adopted since, is between decisions that are hard to reverse and those that are not. Hard-to-reverse decisions deserve caution, consultation, and consensus. Reversible decisions deserve speed and a bias to action.
Most decisions a team makes day-to-day are reversible. Treating them as if they were not creates friction and slows everything down. Giving people permission to act, try something, and learn from the result is one of the simplest things a leader can do to build a more capable and confident team.
One caveat worth holding; reversible decisions made independently across a distributed team can accumulate into patterns that are much harder to undo. A periodic review of clusters of decisions, to catch emergent dependencies before they harden, is worth building into the team's habits.
Commitment After a Decision
Getting to a decision is only part of the job. In a co-located team, post-decision alignment tends to be self-enforcing. In a distributed team, silent non-compliance can become a more common failure mode than open disagreement. Someone who thought the decision was wrong may simply deprioritise it without ever saying so.
After a decision is finalised, it is worth asking each person affected to explicitly signal their commitment in writing. Commitment is not the same as agreement. People can think a decision is wrong and still commit to it. That commitment needs to be stated, not assumed.