The purpose of this document is to think through how decisions are made within organizations, what contributes to good decision-making, and how we can apply those principles to lead to effective decisions within Levels.
Before we consider any process changes, we should consider the principles of how decisions are made and the pitfalls that many organizations experience as it relates to the decision-making process.
It's important that people on the team know when decisions are made. We want to avoid situations where people have conflicting information about what the direction of the company is at any given time.
We want to avoid miscommunications like, "Are you sure? I thought it was X", "No, Person X told me we're doing Y thing", or "Since when? Last I heard we were doing X".
Everyone needs to be rowing in the same direction and a bad process for communicating when decisions are made creates chaos and distrust in organizations.
We've done a reasonably good job of this (certainly compared to other companies I've spoken to) by making use of our Friday Forums and our regular company strategy memos (e.g. ‣, ‣). But as our company scales, we need to be mindful of how decisions are communicated to the right people at the right time. This only gets harder (see Principles of Internal Communications (Comms) - August 2020).
The goal is to make good decisions. Including knowledgeable people in the decision-making process leads to better decisions.
An example of this is when @Sam Corcos wrote an early draft of what ultimately became [DEPRECATED] Job Titles at Levels - September 2021. In the initial draft, @Sam Corcos included a number of experimental ideas around titles — like considering each title a "mission" that would get a mission patch and encouraging people to change titles often — that were conceptually interesting, but after receiving input from @Andrew Conner were clearly not going to work in practice, and he had several examples from his own experience that made a strong case for why the original proposal was a bad idea.
There is a tradeoff here because more input means the decision will take more time, but as a principle, it is fair to say that, in general, more input leads to better decisions.
It's reasonable for people on the team to want to know how we came to important decisions. We're building a culture of transparency, respect, and trust, which means we need to be open about how we made important decisions.
We treat people like adults. It's patronizing to be informed of a major company decision only to be told, "because I said so". That's (stereotypically) how parents interact with their children — not how adults work together.
Sometimes the reason behind a decision will be as simple as, "I don't really know why I believe this, but it's not worth spending more time on it, so let's go with our intuition." And there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that! But the team should know that this is an arbitrary decision made for the sake of expediency. This is important for the additional reason that someone might actually be aware of a very good reason not to do a thing in X way, but assume that the decision-makers are doing it that way for some very good reason.
The way that Jeff Bezos describes this at Amazon is that decisions are either "one-way" or "two-way" doors. A one-way door is a decision that is not easily reversible, while a two-way door can easily be rolled back: