Decide: Decision Quality, Judgement and Decision Records

All courses / AI Leader / Module 2 / Chapter 7

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

Explain why decision quality is judged by the process at the time and what hindsight research adds to that.
Compare RACI and RAPID as instruments for assigning the right to decide.
Run a pre-mortem with decider, recommender, facilitator and challenger, and judge it by whether dissenters spoke.
Draft a leadership decision record that can be read after the outcome.

Key concepts

Hindsight: In Fischhoff's experiments, people told how an event ended rated it as more likely than people who were not told, and seemed largely unaware of the change. The book's implication: only a record made before the outcome protects the decider and lets the organisation learn.
RAPID: The Bain framework with five roles: Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide. The chapter prefers it to RACI for a decision because it separates the person who proposes from the person who decides and gives mandatory constraints, such as legal ones, their own seat.
Reversibility as the first sort: A two-way decision takes a light process; a one-way decision goes to the tier that can reverse it. The cut layers of both organisations show how a decision can look two-way and behave one-way.
Pre-mortem: The team assumes the project has failed and generates plausible reasons. The chapter reads the original study of prospective hindsight as weak support for a cognitive effect; what the technique demonstrably changes is the social situation, giving dissent a legitimate time and place.
Leadership decision record: The LDR: short, numbered and immutable, carrying the decider and the right, the options, the reasons, the evidence with its date, the dissent, the reversibility, the tripwires, the AI involvement and the review date. The AI field is filled even when the answer is no.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Interactive exercise 1 · Match

Roles in a pre-mortem

Match each role in the chapter's practical guide for a pre-mortem to what the guide says about it.

Interactive exercise 2 · Scenario

Judging a decision that turned out badly

Apply the chapter's view of decision quality to a review after the outcome is known.

Teaching plan

15 min	Lecture on decision quality and hindsight; participants recall one decision they judged by its outcome and say what a record at the time would have contained.
15 min	The teacher compares RACI and RAPID on one real decision and introduces reversibility as the first sort, with the two cut layers as examples.
15 min	Close reading of LDR-HM-2029-0005 on the team-leader posts in the Dutch claims centre: decider and right, the chief financial officer's recorded dissent, tripwires and the AI field.
35 min	Exercise: groups run a short pre-mortem on a pending decision and write the decision record.
10 min	Quiz and Monday task: write a retrospective record for the last significant decision, marked as retrospective, with a review date.

Discussion

The chapter says the absence of AI in a decision is itself a claim that needs evidence. Why should a record say no with a reason instead of leaving the field out?
In a public authority, reasons must be written on the assumption that a journalist, a union and a court may read them. How does that change what you write in the evidence and dissent fields?
A right that law assigns to a management body or an accountable official cannot be reassigned by a register. Where do your authority matrix and the law currently disagree about who decides?

Written exercise

Exercise · 35 minutes

Pre-mortem and decision record

In groups of four, choose a pending decision in one member's organisation, or the 2029 question at Hansa Mutual of what to do about the 18 team-leader posts not reinstated after Lean Claims. Assign the roles decider, recommender, facilitator and challenger. Run a fifteen-minute pre-mortem: assume the decision failed and list the reasons, the challenger arguing against the favoured option. Then write the decision record: decider with the stated right and a deputy, recommender, options including doing nothing, evidence with source and date, the dissent as given, reversibility, two tripwires that can be checked, whether AI took part and how, and a review date.

Deliverable: A leadership decision record of one page with recorded dissent, two checkable tripwires, an AI field and a review date.

Your work

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

By what does the chapter say a pre-mortem should be judged?
Show the answer
D. By whether the dissenters spoke
The original study gives weak support for a cognitive effect of prospective hindsight. What the pre-mortem changes is the meeting: dissent gets a legitimate time and place, so the test is whether the dissenters used it.
Why does the chapter call RAPID a better tool than RACI for a decision?
Show the answer
B. It separates the person who proposes from the person who decides and gives mandatory constraints their own seat
RACI assigns roles for a task or deliverable. RAPID has one recommender, an agree role for mandatory requirements such as legal ones, and a decider who makes the final call if the two cannot reconcile.
What would have made a retrospective review of Nordvik's 2024 reorganisation One Region possible, according to the chapter?
Show the answer
A. A review date and a tripwire in the 2024 decision, such as the span of unit managers above 35
The span of unit managers above 35 and the stopped coaching of new unit managers are the kind of thing a tripwire can name. Without a review date and a tripwire, the decision could not be checked afterwards.