Up-level your decision-making capabilities with Catalyze APAC

In a recent conversation with Sprouta, Paul Gordon, co-founder of Catalyze discusses decision-making, and the impact that conscious decision making at all levels can have in an organisation, and how small steps can achieve great things in supporting successful transformations in organisations and creating confidence in your future.  

Leonie: Why decision making? Why is that such a passion of yours?

Paul: We make tens of thousands of decisions every day. In fact, it's fundamental to being human. Without a decision, nothing changes, no action is taken. So, it's the central point of making an impact, delivering purpose and delivering results. When you think about it, it’s one of the greatest possible impacts out there in organisations (and the world) that will make the biggest difference. Most people don't think of decision-making as a definitive skill set for an organisation. Decisions tend to just get made unconsciously.

For me, shining a light on the fact that a decision is a ‘thing’ is crucial, because as soon as we look at what we’re doing and realise we’re just about to make a decision, we will see it’s going to change the direction of my organisation, or change the engagement of my employees, or change how much money we make. Ultimately, we will be judged by the decisions we make. When you realise you’re about to make a decision, you can then apply best practice, methodology, tools and skills that will improve how that decision is made. This is so fundamental to what we do, and it’s really what had me excited to focus in this area.  
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There's not a lot out there in the world where people are focusing their attention on decision making, especially not in the way we at Catalyze do, which is very much about the human dimension in decision making, supported by the data and technology.

Our mission is enabling effective decisions. How we're doing that, our fundamental purpose is by transforming the way the world makes decisions.  

Leonie: I heard something years ago that really stuck with me “decisions define your life” I think this is powerful, because I don't think people are that conscious about making decisions every day.  What are your thoughts?

Paul: It is a really important point because most decision making is entirely unconscious. Think about that. How many organisations do you know, who are overt or transparent about how decisions are made?

As you know, what Catalyze is trying to do is to shift this, and have people become conscious about the decisions they're making so that they have agency in their decision making.  

As you say, your life is defined by the decisions you make. Many people look at their lives and think, “how did I get here?” It's a string of decisions that were made unconsciously rather than choosing to be there. Bringing consciousness to decision making fundamentally changes who you are as a human being. So that's really what it is to be human and have satisfaction in our lives is really taking charge of our decision making.  

Leonie: How does this apply to organisations when you've got hundreds or thousands of people making many decisions? What is the value to organisations and what's the opportunity?  

Paul: Decision making usually comes from two directions, ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’. For bottom up, there are a lot of decisions being made by individuals throughout the organisation, by small teams, impacting on the organisation. So, you could say an organisation is just a network of decisions that are happening. If that's all going on unconsciously or randomly, it's not terribly coherent. The risk is you end up heading in different directions, with people operating from different agendas. Sound familiar?  

So, the opportunity in bottom-up decision making is if individuals start having a more consistent, more conscious way of thinking about their individual decision making, the way they make decisions, this will start to have greater coherence for an organisation.  

If you look at it from the top down, this is where you're making big decisions such as the direction of your business, the next merger you're going to undertake, the new product offering, or how you're going to restructure.  If you can engage your people in these big decisions, then it's much more likely that decision will stick and be executed, and people will be on board with them. So, you can look at it from the top down, having the organisation move much more effectively forward. And you can look at it from the bottom up, having much greater coherency with how everyone's doing what they're doing.  

Leonie: What specific problems are you solving for clients currently?

Paul: We work with many different organisations both in the private and public sectors, large organisations, small organisations, social enterprises, not for profits. We work everywhere, so we're solving many different problems from large scale, organisation wide to much smaller problems.  For example, we’re working for a big corporate, who have to make some very hard one-off decisions about the future of assets that need decommissioning. There are huge numbers of stakeholders involved, from environmental groups through to technical groups, through to local interest groups, community groups. They've all got different opinions and perspectives, and there are significant trade-offs in the decision, from environmental impact to economic impact to social impact.  

Then at a more day to day level, looking at the bottom-up approach, the problem we're solving is working with organisations to give every person in their organisation skills in decision making. How can they think differently about decisions that they're making?  The opportunity is that everyone across an organisation has a consistent way of thinking about decision making, even if they're applying that decision making to many different problems. This might even include, of course, decisions that are happening outside of work in their life.  

Leonie: What kind of work do you do with clients?  How do they know that decision making is something they need to address?  

Paul: We tend to work in three different ways with clients.  

1. Facing a big decision: The most frequent way clients work with us is they have a big decision or a process that they're grappling with, and we bring our tools and techniques, our facilitation skills, our methodologies to help them build and run a decision process.  

2. Decision Coaching and Mentoring: We work with leadership teams on elevating their decision skills. Some clients then want us by their side every time they're making decisions - to help coach and help them head in the right direction by making decisions with confidence. Imagine the traditional coaching model, but think of it specifically about decision making, because leaders are making decisions all the time – they might be taking an opportunity to the board. How do I best present the story? I need to have a conversation with my organisation. How do I do that? So, what we bring is some reminders of the key skills and capabilities in decision making that they have.  

3. Upskilling in Decision Making:  We run programs and provide specific tools and skills to the individuals across the organisation. We're seeing some growth in that area, particularly in the current climate with workforce mobility, competition in the workforce and doing more with less. Smart employers are saying it really serves them to have their people well equipped to make their own decisions in whatever they're doing, not just in their work, but in their future career choices, in their family life, in their relationships. Providing some fundamental decision thinking skills for them is really valuable to them as employees. And it's a great contribution an employer can make to their team.  

Leonie: In terms of transformation, we're seeing a lot of challenges with our clients around the execution of transformation. So, either they want to transform, they've got the vision, but then the execution falls flat or change fails. What role does decision making play in that?

Paul: We've all seen the big transformation programs that are often done by large consulting companies. They're very costly and resource intensive and 70% of them don't actually achieve the outcome you want. Decision making is fundamental to turning out transformation. Firstly, if you look at a transformation program, there's the very top-down decisions, such as what is the desired future state? There's a range of decisions that are made right at the highest level of the organisation. How these decisions are made will be fundamental to the success of the transformation. What is typically the case is that the future state is outsourced – advisors decide. So now that future state belongs to the advisors, not to the company! That's the first big problem. The second problem is that the leadership team may develop the strategy and they work out the future state for the organisation and then announce to everyone the direction they are going. The rest of the organisation then holds their head in their hands and asking, what's happening? What say do we get in this?  

Imagine an alternative, where the conversation for determining what matters to the organisation and where its headed involves the whole organisation with good decision process.  Every day, companies are going through transformation and asking people to work in a different way – and it needs everyone to decide to work in that way.

If everyone is equipped to make those decisions in a way that's consistent with how the transformation decision was made, and if they feel like they have some agency in what they do day to day, then you've got a much better chance of the transformation sticking.  

Leonie:  And what ROI can you expect from working with you on decision making?

Paul: Firstly, there is much more confidence, engagement, commitment and longevity of your workforce. If your people have agency in their decision making and they have skills in decision making, they're much more likely to be engaged in what you're up to as a business. So just keeping a well engaged, well empowered workforce is a big ROI.  

Another aspect is a lack of confidence in the leadership, because the leadership are making decisions behind closed doors or all the decisions end up floating to the top. So, if leadership can elevate their decision skills and use more transparent process, the confidence in the leadership will turn out better results for the business. At its fundamental level, using best practice decision making, when you make, say, investment decisions about future directions for your business, will improve the return on the physical investment. If we decide not to do one thing and we do another thing, this will deliver us a better outcome. We need good decision process for that. So, there's a financial ROI and a reputational ROI.  

There's such a shift towards outcomes like delivering a triple bottom line. So, how do I deliver minimising my climate impact, how do I improve my social impact, how do I demonstrate my governance impact?

Fundamentally, at its heart is decision making with those trade-offs between environmental, social and governance outcomes. So, using best practice decision making, you can turn out your triple bottom line in a way that's totally transparent and entirely reliable. This is a big ROI, both in terms of delivering our commitments to impact or ESG and also then delivering our reputational impact - we're seen as an organisation that acts consistently with what we say.  

Leonie: What kind of impact is decision making having on organisations?

Paul: The simplest one is the financial impact, saving money and resources. This includes what to say no to.  One of the challenges most organisations have is choosing what not to do when they've got lots of shiny things like new products to take to market or new markets to expand into. Everyone's got lots of ideas on what we should do. No one's ready to say, ‘we shouldn't do this’. As soon as organisations use best practice decision making, and actually commit to not doing some things, this frees you up to do the things you chose properly – doing the right things well, not everything badly. That is a big financial impact.  

Confidence impact is another one. Everyone's experience is that the world is so uncertain at the moment. Anything that improves an organisation's confidence to make its moves going forward and to make perhaps bolder moves is really important.  

The other impact is improving or reinforcing your organisations’ position in the world, your reputation and your social license.

So, the impact is having people say, “I can see that organisation is actually acting consistently with its purpose, in its best interest”. Good decision making really supports that in a very transparent way.  

Leonie:  What would you say to Chief People Officers who make, who are wanting to improve decision making capability in their organization?

Paul: Start with the foundations. It’s important to start to make a shift in how your organisation makes decisions. Looking at how your people make decisions can be a very simple starting point. It doesn't need to be some massive project that's going to take months or years. You can start with a 90-minute session on fundamental decision-making principles that you can run for your whole team, and then build on that as people lean in. You can have a huge impact with relatively small steps at the beginning.

Start with the principles and provide that to everybody so that the entire organization has a common lens of decision thinking. And that could be small, short, sharp and simple.

Then engage your senior leaders, have the leadership team look at ‘how do we go about making decisions?’  This could be building some core principles, or training them in foundational decision-making skills or providing them with specific support for a significant decision. Then, have the organization commit to a good decision framework. Most organizations have what they might think is well-defined decision processes, but really, they are more like governance processes – to ensure shareholders’ interests are protected. For example, any investment decision has to go to the investment committee as part of the governance process. How we decide what we're taking to the investment committee, how we decide whether we're going to say yes or no, which things we do or don't do - that's decision process and is very distinct from governance or approval.

It doesn't necessarily have to work in this order.  A good way to engage leadership, is to use an example of a decision or a situation the organisation is facing - a real challenge - and apply best practice decision making to that. This makes it clear that the leadership team are engaging, they're serious about this. So, the rest of the organisation are going to get that commitment. It's a great example for what it looks like in practice, which can then be used as a working case study.  

Leonie: What is your mission? Why do you do, what you do!

Paul:

Our mission is to enable effective decisions. So, wherever we see a decision that’s not effective, there's a place we can have an impact.

And we do this through our purpose - to transform the way the world makes decisions that matter, bringing clarity, confidence and commitment to every decision. And the word ‘transform’, for us, is critical - once you've seen decision thinking and experienced it, you can’t ‘unsee’ it. If you can give your people the “I never thought of decision making like that” moment, it’s something that will stick with them for a long time and will really help out in many, many ways.  

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