Are 25% of innovation decisions headed off the rails?
At September’s PDMA Inspire Conference in New Orleans a few weeks back, Wayne Fisher of Rockdale Innovation and David Matheson of SmartOrg facilitated a session titled “Improving Decision making in Innovation”. The session was well-received, and innovation professionals really appreciated the idea of Decision Quality.
77% scored high enough to warrant “slowing down and running a decision process
When asked “How would you know a good decision if you saw one?”, audience members said things like “Alignment with goal and vision” and “Aligned with expectations” and “True alignment (not just superficial agreement)”—are you getting a theme?
Many people had breakthroughs: getting commitment was the part of a good decision and the result of a process that could be engineered! Many also realized that their current process framework (Stage Gate) wasn’t set up to deliver good decisions, resulting in frustration in this area, and were inspired that there might be a better way.
Decision Professionals can really help. While innovation has some unique issues, their problems are strikingly similar to things we all know well. When participants scored decisions they faced on the Decision Complexity Card, 77% scored high enough to warrant “slowing down and running a decision process” and 25% scored so high that they should “consider consulting a decision professional”.
Maybe that is why the majority of participants said that important “go/no go” decisions were made outside the context of their gate meetings.
Find out more
SmartOrg has spent decades crafting decision support tools for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) and Innovation Management. Click to discover:
