Overview

Decision-making is an important part of a foundation team member’s daily work.

  1. We use our values to guide the decisions we make.
  2. All work is assigned to a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI). A DRI is ultimately responsible for deciding or ensuring a project or task is completed. While the DRI is the individual who is ultimately held accountable for the success or failure of any given project, they may or may not be the individual who does the tactical project work. DRIs may assign work to other team members when needed.
  3. Part of making good decisions is considering who has good information and/or experience that could inform that decision. The DRI should listen to the data and inform the opinions of other team members to arrive at decisions.
  4. We separate data gathering from decision-making:
    1. Data gathering: where team members contribute data and informed opinions
    2. Decision making: when the DRI decides what to do
  5. When making decisions, DRIs should explicitly acknowledge the quality and quantity of the data that is available for the decision. Resist using poor data to justify judgment calls. It is ok to make a judgment call with limited data, but make sure that is known.
  6. Be aware of your unconscious biases and emotional triggers.
  7. DRIs do not owe anyone an explanation for their decisions.
  8. We commit to executing the decision as long as it is in place. Any past decisions are open to questioning as long as we act in accordance with them until they may be changed.
  9. When you want to reopen the conversation on a prior decision, show that your argument is informed by previous conversations and assume the decision was made with the best intent. You should communicate with the DRI who can change the decision instead of someone who can't.

Proposals: Decision-Making

Decisions that require input, buy-in, or awareness of others should be accompanied by a brief, documented proposal in the form of an agenda or Google Doc. It should include the following:

  1. Options considered: what alternative approaches were considered, including the one that you recommend?
  2. Evaluation criteria: the criteria used to assess and select the recommended option; include notes on relative weights/importance of the criteria, if used
  3. Recommendation: justification for why your preferred path was recommended over others.
    1. When appropriate and possible, this should include a recommendation grounded in data.