How to Decide when to Decide

Intro Summary

To decide or not to decide. That is the question!

You’ll never have 100% information. Even with hindsight all you can see is the results of the choice that was made. So how do you know when to just choose something and move on versus deliberate and/or wait for someone else to make the decision?

Today we’ll be asking lots of questions that will get you thinking and help you figure out a plan of attack.

Game Production is Weird

This question is from a games producer and I’m a game producer. So firstly… let’s talk about the weird role of game production.

Producers often don’t fit into regular org hierarchies since they aren’t the direct manager of their team members, but they’re also trying to get the team to execute on a plan so they kinda need to tell people what to do. Of course, what a producer actually does and where they fit depends on the individual company and can vary widely. However, often producers aren’t actually making any decisions themselves beyond suggestions to creatives, tech people, and the team as a whole. And yet… producers must make decisions sometimes to help get the game made.

What I’m about to say next applies to everyone at a games company, not just the producers, although some parts will be more production focused.

How should you approach whether you should or shouldn’t make a decision?

You ask a bunch more questions!

Most likely you won’t have clear answers to any of these questions, but hopefully your answers (or lack thereof) will help you figure out what to do or not do as the case may be.

Check the framing and decision categorisation

• Is the decision premise solid?
  • Perhaps you’re mistaking the symptom for the problem
  • For example, someone might say: “there’s too many meetings. Let’s decide to get rid of some meetings”.
    • Here it probably isn’t the number of meetings that’s at fault. It’s how effective the meetings are.
    • Instead of cancelling meetings, you would attempt to understand why current meetings aren’t effective and fix that instead.
• Is this actually the right decision to make right now?
  • Can it wait for another month to allow space for more pressing work and/or decisions?
  • A sub-question of this is:
    • Do we need to make another decision first that is blocking this decision?
      • For example, we can’t decide the standard dimensions of art assets in our platformer game until we’ve decided how high the player-character can jump.
• What type of decision is it?
  • Is it strategic vs day-to-day; creative vs technical vs production vs another discipline?
  • What you’re trying to get at in this question is understanding the scope of the decision which will help you figure out impact and who is meant to be making the decision.
• Is it an arbitrary choice and/or about defining terminology?
  • For example, deciding whether your alpha build due before or after alpha phase is done is just about definitions.
  • In these cases, what’s important is that everyone on the team is using the words in the same way so that expectations are managed.

Consider the history of other decisions the team has made

• Has this type of decision been made before?
  • If so, what happened in that case? Can you do the same here?
• Does one of the decision choices align with project or company goals?
  • If so, then it will make your decision easier.
• Who usually makes this type of decision?
  • Is it an individual, or a group of people?
  • Or is it unknown who is supposed to make the decision?
    • In which case, you probably need to figure out who makes the decision about who’s making this decision!
• Has the decision maker gone on holiday?
  • If so, hopefully before they left they gave instructions on the types of decisions that need to wait for them vs ones you can make without them.

Examine the timing of the decision

• When does the decision need to be made?
  • And the follow up to that question is: Where is the urgency coming from? Is it internal, external, involving key stakeholders?
• If you don’t step in and do something, when is it likely that the decision will actually be made?
  • Is that within the required timeframe?

All of these questions help you figure out how urgently the decision needs to be made. If it can wait until the regular decision maker or markers are back around, then it’s probably best to wait.

Look at what you know

The following questions get to the crux of the matter since they look at what you actually know about the decision and what the results of inaction or a bad choice will be.

• What happens if a decision isn’t made within the timeframe you already identified?
  • Will you miss an opportunity? If so, will there be another opportunity like this in the future?
  • Would not making a decision make things worse?
    • For example, is this an emergency situation where a team mate is in a crisis or a publisher deadline will pass.
• What are the risks and/or impact of a bad decision?
  • That is focus on the cons to see what pops out.
    • Could this affect the entire game and/or game development negatively?
    • Are you risking: your job? everyone’s jobs? months of work? or a few hours of work?
  • If you make a bad decision, how would you backtrack to get to where you are right now? How long would that take?
• What assumptions are you making?
  • If you can’t see any, ask other people on the team to help you identify them.
• With all that in mind ask: Do we have enough information to make this decision?
  • In other words:
    • How confidently have you been able to answer all the above questions?
    • How big are the unknowns?
  • If you don’t know enough, ask:
    • When will we get enough information?
    • How will we get enough information?

Don’t make a decision based on minimal and uncertain information unless you won’t realistically be able to get more information. You’ll have to use your gut a bit here to figure out what “enough information” is, since you’ll never know everything.

It’s important to note that it is OK to block the team

If:

• it’s only for a short period of time.
• it will be hard and/or time consuming to undo the work later.
• the choices of direction forward are widely different and/or choosing one direction blocks a different direction.
• the team would be building on top of work that either:
  • is totally new and nothing like this has ever been done before; or
  • has a low probability of approval during a review.

Making A Decision

If you realise a decision does need to be made, here are the steps to go through. With all the questions above you should have a head start on the initial ones:

1. Obtain as much information as you can
2. Exam your logic, biases, and assumptions
3. Think through short and long term impacts on resources, risks, productivity.
4. Check with other team members
5. Make the decision
6. Document it so that everyone knows what was decided
7. Be comfortable with resulting uncertainty

Note you can cheat a bit too. You can:

• Assign someone else to be the decision maker.
• Not go in-depth on every step and even skip some steps if it’s a low impact decision.
• If it’s similar to other decisions that have been made recently, you can just make the same decision as last time.
• Make a partial decision.
  • For example: tell someone to work on a task today, but tell them to check in tomorrow before continuing.
  • Or if the decision is about which production process to use or establishing a new production process: tell people that you’ll just try out one option for 2 weeks and then will assess how it’s working and if you want to iterate or throw out that process.

Dealing with Team Decision Paralysis

Sometimes teams end up with decision paralysis where no one is prepared to actually make the decision. This happens more frequently when:

• teams attempt to get consensus from every team member;
• or the decision maker is not confident in their authority to make decisions.

If these cases, the producer can become a deciding tie breaker vote to keep things moving forwards or bolster the actual decision maker so that person can get their confidence back.

Avoid Making Decisions

What’s better than making a decision when you aren’t meant to and under time pressure? Not getting into that sort of position in the first place.

By doing some prediction and prep you might be able to avoid making a decision at all. How do you do this?

• Try to make sure there are always some backup side quests for people to work on. This might be polishing assets, updating documentation, playing a current build of the game and so on.
• When setting up processes to complete features and content, make sure time to review each stage is explicitly part of the process. Rather than assuming someone can instantly go from one stage to the next.
  • Let’s do a quick example.
  • Imagine 2 art assets are needed: asset A and asset B. If the artist worked on asset A until it was fully finished and then started work on B, they would likely get blocked along the way when someone didn’t provide timely feedback and/or asks for changes before moving on. Instead do:
    1. sketches and concept art for asset A
    2. sketches and concept art for B while A is getting reviewed
    3. next steps for A while B is getting reviewed
    4. next steps for B while A is getting reviewed
    5. and so on through all the steps to create your assets
• If a decision maker will be away,
  • check to make sure everyone knows what to do for all the time they’re away PLUS an extra few days after they’re back. Consider what could change that would mean people don’t know what to do.
  • before they leave, make sure you know which decisions they absolutely do not want you make without them. e.g. they might have a particular part of the game they’re passionate about.
• Sometimes you are asked on the spot to make a decision right now.
  • You shouldn’t make a rash decision because someone is pressuring you or there’s implied peer pressure when other people are watching.
  • If you don’t have an instant answer, don’t just respond straight away. It’s ok to ask for time to stop and think it all through.
  • If you do ask for more time, make sure that expectations are clear about when you will follow up. And remember to actually follow up so people can trust you more.
• Do an audit of your decision making processes as a team and figure out how to improve them. Maybe that’s considering terminology like a RACI chart (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed), maybe it’s just looking at what’s regularly blocking decisions.

Conclusions

So there we have a bunch of questions to answer the original question. And some advice about decision making. Hopefully that’s helpful!

At the end of the day, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: no one can ever know all the information that would lead to 100% confidence in a decision. So you and/or the decision maker will just have to do your best to get as much information as possible, trust your gut a little, and learn from past decisions.

Remember: This is general advice and it might not be right for you and your team, even if you’re the one who wrote in the question! For me to help better, it needs to be a dialog between me, and you, and your entire team. You can hire me to consult for you —> jennsand.com .

If you have a question for me, just fill in my form over here: jennsand.com/askjenn/

Checklist of just the questions to ask so you can copy-paste them into a personal template

• Framing and decision categorisation
  1. Is the decision premise solid?
  2. Is this actually the right decision to make right now?
     • Do we need to make another decision first that is blocking this decision?
  3. What type of decision is it? Is it strategic vs day-to-day; creative vs technical vs production vs another discipline?
  4. Is it an arbitrary choice and/or about defining terminology?
• History of other decisions the team has made
  1. Has this type of decision been made before?
     • If so, what happened in that case? Can you do the same here?
  2. Does one of the decision choices align with project or company goals?
  3. Who usually makes this type of decision? Is it an individual or a group of people or unknown?
  4. Has the decision maker gone on holiday?
• Timing of the decision
  1. When does the decision need to be made?
     • Where is the urgency coming from? Is it internal, external, involving key stakeholders?
  2. If you don’t step in and do something, when is it likely that the decision will actually be made?
     • Is that within the required timeframe?
• What do you know?
  1. What happens if a decision isn’t made within the timeframe you already identified?
     • Will you miss an opportunity? If so, will there be another opportunity like this in the future?
     • Would not making a decision make things worse?
  2. What are the risks and/or impact of a bad decision?
     • Could this affect the entire game and/or game development negatively?
     • Are you risking: your job? everyone’s jobs? months of work? or a few hours of work?
     • If you make a bad decision, how would you backtrack to get to where you are right now? How long would that take?
  3. What assumptions are you making? If you can’t see any, ask other people on the team to help you identify them.
  4. Do we have enough information to make this decision?
     • How confidently have you been able to answer all the above questions?
     • How big are the unknowns?
     • If you don’t know enough, ask:
       • When will we get enough information?
       • How will we get enough information?