I’m giving you my framework for free in this blog.
Seriously. The secret sauce. The recipe.
How to improve your decision making in your business or on your team.
I’ve sat across from a lot of founders who can tell me everything about their business - their revenue, their team, their product roadmap, their competitor landscape. But when I ask “what decision have you been avoiding?” they pause. Then laugh. Then usually say something like “which one?”
I’ve written before about your junk drawer. Now it’s time to dig in and see what’s in yours.
Step 1: Dump it out.
Get all your decisions you’ve been hesitating to make out on the table. Make a list with you and your team on a whiteboard.
When I do this exercise with clients, we usually end up with 12-20 items on the board. And about half of them have been sitting in that drawer for 6+ months. Some for years.
Step 2: Sort by category
What ones are for growth? Which ones are operational? Strategy? Make as many categories as you need - but make sure none are in two categories. We need them all dumped out but organized. (For those of you reading this who work at McKinsey - yes, I’m talking about MECE: Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.)
Here’s what’s interesting - most teams want to put decisions in multiple categories. “This is BOTH growth AND operational!” Sure. But which fire are you actually trying to put out?
Step 3: Pick the ONE thing you need to do right now
We are looking for the thing that is most on fire. Where you need to aim the extinguisher first. Let’s start by putting a price on these decisions. Is there one costing you revenue? How much? How about one that is preventing you from scaling? Or is it a staffing issue that prevents you from meeting goals?
I worked with a CEO who had 15 decisions in his drawer. When we put a dollar figure on each one, he realized his staffing indecision was costing him $40K/month in missed contracts. Not the sexy strategic pivot he wanted to work on. But the one bleeding cash right now.
Don’t worry, you will go back and work on the smoldering ones soon enough. But let’s get a problem under control and fixed.
Three steps. That’s all it takes to go from “I’ll deal with that later” to actually making progress.
But here’s the thing about junk drawers - everyone can open theirs and see the mess. Not everyone can actually clean it out. Because once it’s all on the table, you still have to decide what stays, what goes, and what you’re going to do about it TODAY.
And that’s usually where the drawer gets closed again.