Last time we looked at the Advice Process as a simple (in principal) 4 step decision making technique -

• Decide who should decide

• Make a proposal

• Seek advice

• Decide.

While the process itself is very simple, getting it working in most organisations is very tricky because it completely upends a number of pretty baked in cultural conventions - use of hierarchical authority, undermining consensus to get your own way, lack of trust requiring approvals and so on. The existing culture will fight this process every inch of the way. But, if the organisation is really serious, really puts some resources into this and pushes it forward, it can act as a significant catalyst to cultural change. By changing the way decisions are made, the cultural conventions around decision making can be transformed.

So last time I talked about large companies and some of the reasons why they make sub-optimal decisions. Not bad decisions, but ones that aren't as good as they could be. The main reason for sub-optimisation was centralisation of decision making and the main reason for centralisation was the need for control. In particular the control on spending money. With no central control of funding, anyone could spend a bunch of company money and the company would soon be broke.

If decentralised decisions are more optimal because the person making them has more information than someone further from the coal face, but centralisation is required for spend control, what are large companies to do? Are they doomed to make sub-optimal decisions forever? Fortunately, no. There are ways of maintaining centralised control of spend while allowing decentralised decision making about where to spend money. There are, in fact, many ways to do this and we will look at one of them now. I'm calling it outcome based funding; I'm sure the financial folks have a fancy, official name for it, but outcome based funding will do for now.

Everyone who has ever worked for a large company knows that they make really silly decisions. Completely illogical decisions. Decisions so monumentally ridiculous that you wonder how the company actually manages to survive as a going concern, let alone turn a profit. It's seemingly obvious to everyone in the organisation, except the senior executives who are making the decisions. Good projects aren't funded, bad ones are. Good teams or departments are restructured but poorly performing ones aren't. Opportunities are lost. How do they continue to make money with all these bad decisions? And why do smart executives continue to make them?

The answer of course is that big companies very seldom make truly bad decisions. What they make are a lot of very sub-optimal decisions. Decisions made are seldom illogical, there is a lot of reasoning that goes into them. Unfortunately, that logic and reasoning is based on very poor information. The decisions they make are good enough to stay in business and continue to make significant amounts of money. They just aren't the best decisions possible. The real question isn't "how can companies still make money while making poor decisions" but "how much more money could they make if they made better decisions". Looking at the reasons why companies make sub-optimal decisions can point us to ways to make better ones.