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How to decide what you don’t decide

On a Maine island just after a meeting, in this spontaneous 2-minute video Craig explains how to make a plan for deciding things in the future: establish decision criteria in the form of questions.

Here’s what Craig says in the video

Hey everybody. Hi. It’s Craig Freshley here. I just finished up a meeting on Chebeague Island, Maine.  I was working with a group and before I take the boat home I thought I would tell you something that we talked about.

We made a lot of decisions in today’s meeting, but we didn’t make all the decisions that the organization needs to make, and for those things that we didn’t decide at least we decided how to decide.

We made a list of criteria. We went at it like this. We said, “Well look, when something comes up that you have to make a decision about, what questions will you ask yourself in order to make that decision?” And we listed those questions.

Like, they might get asked if they’re going to do a new program. And if they want to do a new program they’re going to ask themselves: “Does it clearly address our mission? Do we have the current capacity to do it?” And, “How will that impact our capacity? Who else might be able to do that if not us?” Those sort of things.

Pretty simple idea. The idea is that even if you can’t decide everything, at least decide how you’re going to decide. What criteria are you going to use in the future?

Okay. If you look right over here, there’s my boat. It’s about to leave so I better go get on it! Thanks everybody.

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