Decision Velocity

Achieving faster, better results depends on decision-making velocity – a team’s ability to increase the quality and quantity of decisions made in a particular stretch of time through behavioral and logistical agreements.

Decisions are the fuel for high-performance teams, and represent a key success metric in the future of work. The more decisions are made, the more results can come from them. Conventional management philosophies often strive for consensus to avoid risk instead of developing a bias for action, which can result in delays, confusion, or unnecessary conflict.

In TeamOps, success is correlated with the group’s decision velocity, which is evidenced by the average duration of a collaboration process; and quality, value, or accuracy of the changes made from a decision.

Action tenets of maximizing decision velocity, including real-world examples of each, are below.

Documented workflows

Building on the tenet of creating a shared reality with a Single Source of Truth, decision velocity is maximized when documentation is applied to operational processes and expectations. Establishing a common set of procedures and best practices for the workflows of your team ensures that each team member is equipped to fulfill the expectations of their assignments, while replacing the objectives of physical supervision – quality assurance and as-needed clarification of instructions.

Having a shared guide in a team promotes measurement clarity, results standardization, worker autonomy, efficient onboarding, continuous improvement, and operational scalability. By providing a common reference point, these documented workflows enhance efficiency and consistency, ultimately leading to improved team productivity and outcomes.

Give agency

Efficient execution requires granting agency by default. A critical component of workforce autonomy, agency empowers team members to independently and proactively make decisions without permission, review, or approval—in other words, to self-govern as a manager of one. Leaders who grant this kind of agency also communicate their trust in individual team members to do what they feel is necessary to accommodate their unique needs and to design custom strategies to focus their time and attention on what they deem most important for the organization’s success.

Valuing agency so highly doesn’t mean assuming all organizational decisions will be made completely independently. Collaboration is still a critical component of TeamOps. But does every organizational decision require collaboration? To enhance their teammates’ sense of agency, leaders can start by removing rules or permissions for smaller operational components such as meeting attendance, personal task management systems, or working schedules.

Agency is the antidote to micromanagement, which crushes execution, stifles creativity, and diminishes retention. Greater individual autonomy brings about a shared reality in which all team members feel encouraged to design how and when they want to contribute—and that fuels both individual and collective success.

Push decisions to the lowest possible level

As many decisions as possible should be made by the person doing the work (the DRI), not by their manager or their manager’s manager. Fostering this kind of ownership can:

• enhance agency by empowering people to directly and immediately make necessary changes to their work,
• increase efficiency by eliminating delays while waiting for approval, and
• free senior leaders from the burden of making decisions that stunt their own productivity.

In the spirit of iteration, TeamOps encourages executing a sub-optimal decision with full conviction—then returning to it later to improve upon it based on post-decision feedback—rather than executing on a full decision with sub-optimal conviction. Each project’s DRI knows a project’s moving parts and the impacts of a particular choice more than anyone else does; that person should be trusted with full accountability over it.

Bias for action

A bias for action accelerates ideation, collaboration, and execution better than alignment and consensus. This bias stems from the agency and ownership with which every individual is empowered in an organization practicing TeamOps. People can then use that autonomy to optimize their own proactivity, self-efficacy, and creativity. A team member operating in a conventional organizational context might feel compelled to ask “Should I?” A team member operating via TeamOps can instead think “I will.”

When facing decisions that may involve imperfect information or failures, having a bias for action ensures a more rapid pace of execution. This may require a greater organizational tolerance for mistakes and an appreciation for two-way door decisions, which teams should discuss as part of their shared reality and their collaboration guidelines.

Low-context communication

Low-context communication assumes that the person you’re communicating with has little or no context about the topic at hand. This means the person delivering the information is responsible for providing everything the recipient will need to understand the situation and make an informed response—such as SSoT links, definitions, relevant team members, or updates. This empowers individuals to make decisions and take action without needing to ask unnecessary follow-up questions that could have been avoided.

All low-context communication should be:

• Explicit, not implicit
• Direct, not indirect
• Simple, not complex
• Comprehensive, not narrow

A critical principle of low-context communication is to Say Why, not just What. TeamOps organizations recognize that up-front transparency is a foundational element to team member autonomy, transparent documentation, and business continuity. This requires announcements, updates, and decisions to be shared not only with what the change is, but also why it’s being made. While saying “why” does not mean justifying every decision against other alternatives, it does require a leader to articulate their reasoning. This prevents speculation, contributes to institutional memory, and builds trust, which is one of the traits of being a great remote manager.

Also note that each business function may have unique expectations on low-context communication (e.g. what classifies as low-context in sales may not in engineering). If decisions within a function appear to be ill-informed, audit the expectations on context first.

Operational transparency

The importance of transparency in TeamOps is critical – the opportunities for learning that used to be available through observation in a physical workplace now have to be replaced with information-based observation, or documented updates. In this environment, your colleagues and supervisors don’t have the same visibility into your daily activities as they would in a traditional office setting. Therefore, actively demonstrating your transparency and productivity becomes even more important.

Your team’s ability to be transparent in your virtual-first ways of working is crucial for building trust, improving collaboration, and showcasing your productivity and value to each other and the rest of your organization. Easy ways to provide better operational transparency are:

• Set clear goals and communicate them
• Update the project management system and SSoT often with your progress and status
• Maintain an organized calendar and share it with all team members
• Communicate frequently (both asynchronously and synchronously)
• Proactively share achievements, feedback, and questions (both personal and professional)
• Schedule a cadence of recording and showcasing your work (eg: weekly Slack post and quarterly OKR report)
• Be responsive and available for team communication

By being transparent in your virtual work, your team can easily prove productivity and fulfillment of both individual and collective KPIs, which over time ensures accountability, improves the perception of performance, and builds trust.

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