How to Make Great Decisions Async and Avoid Endless Meetings

Most decisions can be made async. Follow these five steps to do it effectively.

Dear subscribers,

Today, I want to share my advice on how you can make great decisions async.

If you learn how to do this well, you’ll save your team from endless hours of meetings and they’ll love you for it.

Here’s my 5-step process:

1. Identify key people

2. Set context

3. Use one channel for communication

4. Use numbered lists for discussion

5. Push for a decision and share it broadly

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1. Identify key people

Every decision should ideally have one decision maker and fewer than five stakeholders to provide input. Avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen.

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2. Set context

The decision maker should create a decision doc with:

1. List of people involved

2. Context

3. Recommendation

4. Options considered with pros and cons

Nobody has time to read long docs, so try to be as concise as possible.

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3.  Use one channel for communication

Ask people to provide input in the decision doc or in one Slack channel.

Avoid starting a bunch of separate threads and then having to play a game of telephone to figure out who said what.

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4: Use numbered lists for discussion

In the decision doc, ask people to discuss async using nested numbered lists. This helps keep things organized (think of it like a Reddit comment thread). Here’s an example:

Discussion:

1. Peter: I like option B because of XYZ.

   1. Daniel: I hadn’t thought of it that way, let’s proceed.

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5. Push for a decision

When it looks like people are reaching alignment, the decision maker should push for a decision:

"It sounds like people prefer #1, any strong objections to moving forward?"

Once confirmed, share the decision far and wide so that everyone is on the same page.

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To recap, the steps are:

1. Identify key people

2. Set context

3. Use one channel for communication

4. Use numbered lists for discussion

5. Push for a decision and share it broadly

If you do the steps above, you’ll be able to make great decisions async and only schedule meetings when absolutely necessary. This is a much better way to make your coworkers feel better than the following:

Peter Yang @petergyang

I schedule alot of Zoom calls and then cancel them to make my coworkers feel better

Of course, sometimes a decision does require a meeting. Usually, it’s when:

1. A decision has a lot of ambiguity

2. A decision is a one way door (hard to reverse)

3. Your decision doc has a lot of discussion without consensus

I’ll cover how to run meetings that don’t suck in my next post.

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