The Decision Context Problem is a term we've coined internally to focus our work on the customer problem we wish to solve. The problem silently drains millions from businesses through poor decision making, misaligned efforts and missed opportunities. It strikes when teams lack crucial business context: gaps in what they know, how it applies to what the company aims to achieve, and how decisions are made day to day. Over the course of our research as well as our current work, we've learned that this problem has many components and second order symptoms.‍

Business Context‍

Siloed context problem

Customer, operations and financial information lives in their own disconnected islands, and dashboards never tell the full story.

Tacit knowledge gap

Critical expertise is trapped at lower levels of the organization and company executives can’t interact with every “front line” worker.

Reality distortion problem‍

Executive status creates barriers to authentic information flow across the organization.

Corporate memory problem‍

Past decisions and their rationale are not documented or not easily searchable at the times they’re needed most. And we’re missing out on a lot of learning from our past decisions.‍

Business Goals

Alignment challenges

Goals lose clarity as they cascade down the organization and misaligned incentives for teams lead to counterproductive work.

Organizational resistanceTeams naturally gravitate to comfort zones established by prior experience and focus areas, instead of immediately integrating goals into their work.

Measurement difficulty

Progress towards goals is challenging to track across all teams in the company.

Slow course correction

Goal changes are delayed due to fear the organization will be too slow to respond. Steering an aircraft carrier instead of a speed boat.‍

Business Decisions‍

Forecasting outcomes problem

Thinking through all of the consequences of decision scenarios is too difficult to do accurately so usually skipped as a result.

Decision process anarchy

Decision makers and their processes are inconsistent across the organization.

Cognitive bias

While we know the science around common decision-making biases, we don’t account for them in practice.

Communication and implementation

It's often hard to communicate just the right amount of information about a decision and its rationale, but it’s important for organization buy-in. And it takes too long to put decisions into action once they are made.