We hope that people will properly implement the decisions that were made. Even when we believe that we have complete consensus on what we are going to do as a group, we find that the implementation is often different.

This comes from mainly two causes. First, people do what is important to them. Even though they might agree that something should be of value, if it isn’t seen by them as important, it will be difficult to get them to act on it. To get people to do what the group decided requires having them believe and understand it from their perspective.

Second, things change. When we make a decision and go to implement it, we have to depend on some key assumptions about the future. The only thing that is absolutely true about the future is that it is changing. Since the world will not unfold exactly as we had planned, we have to be ready for different eventualities.

Click here to see what we do at the Institute for Strategic Clarity to intervene in this same decision making process to strengthen the decision makers ability to understand and make decisions within complex environments.