I confess, I’m a bit obsessed with bottlenecks. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind that slow down your flow of change. I’ve gathered a few links below to solutions for common ones. The theme today is decisions. Maybe one of them will help with whatever bottleneck you’re facing right now?
Decision speed
Suzi Edwards-Alexander pointed me to this interesting article by Dave Girouard: “Speed as a Habit”. It focuses on speed for decisions, which is often what slows everything down. He also addresses the common belief that speed is the enemy of quality. I know you can have both. In fact, high quality can help speed, a lot!
Decentralising decisions
Andrew Harmel Law provides an appealing solution for speeding up architecture decisions whilst keeping them sound: decentralise them “correctly”. (Read it here.) We’ve used architecture decision records for a long time, but this approach makes them even more powerful.
Answering certain hard questions quickly and well
Simon Wardley and Tudor Girba are working on a book called Moldable Development. I’ve only read the first four chapters, but they’re very inspiring. A theme is that by creating tiny, context-aware tools for answering questions about a system, speed and quality of decisions might increase dramatically. Again, they can go hand in hand...
From decision to action
An old favourite book of mine, “The Art of Action” by Stephen Bungay, always feels important here. Maybe the overall decision about direction was taken quickly, but how and when is it translated into action? And what action? Taking the decision is often the easy part. “Yes, there’s a strategy, but I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do” might sound awkwardly familiar. It’s about how to correctly decentralise decisions – and action – to where the information is.
Which are your best suggestions?
This article was originally published on LinkedIn. Join the discussion and read more here.