Question Frameworks
A Conscious Business Action Item
Discussions about conscious leadership often seem abstract. We're advised to be more self-aware, empathetic, inclusive, and mindful in leading our teams and businesses. These goals are vital, but they seldom come with clear, step-by-step instructions. This lack of specificity is due to the contextual nature of conscious leadership, making it challenging to identify broadly applicable examples or concrete action items.
With this context in mind, here's a very real and practical conscious business practice you can implement with your team this week.
The next time you have a decision to make, a problem to solve, or a plan to create - start off by creating a question framework.
Consider which questions you and your team must answer to finalize your approach. If needed, enlist a few team members for brainstorming. For instance:
Scope: What is the core problem?
Cause: Why is this occurring?
Criteria: What must the ideal solution do (or avoid doing) to effectively address the cause?
Alternatives: What options are available, and which aligns best with our criteria?
Risks: What potential issues could arise, and how can we mitigate them?
KPIs: How and when will we measure success, and what targets should we aim for?
Next, present these questions to your stakeholders for feedback. After refining the framework, work through each question systematically. Then, communicate the chosen direction, explaining how you addressed each framework question.
Bonus! Post-implementation, conduct a retrospective focused on improving the original question framework. Identify which aspects effectively guided the initiative. Just as importantly, determine what additional up-front considerations would have saved time, reduced friction, and/or improved results. Use this feedback to develop a reusable decision-making template for similar scenarios in the future.
Value Proposition:
So, why adopt this approach? What's its relevance to Conscious Leadership?
Intention: We rarely give ourselves the opportunity to intentionally design decision-making processes. Yet, the above approach enables us to stop and think through how should we approach this challenge in line with our values.
Inclusion: By thinking through essential questions upfront, we can determine who could/should be involved in each aspect. This can help ensure the right level of inclusion where it matters most.
Trust: Using a decision framework builds stakeholder trust through a transparent, fair process. Research indicates that team members are more likely to support a decision—even if they disagree with it—when they believe a fair process has been employed.
Good Business Practice: Best of all, creating and optimizing decision frameworks doesn’t require any operational tradeoffs. Rather, structured decision-making consistently delivers superior business outcomes compared to ad-hoc methods. And, our benchmarks show that decision frameworks play a key role in dramatically reducing decision-making time.
Bottom Line:
Question frameworks are straightforward tools for guiding intentional decision-making, garnering more stakeholder buy-in, and achieving better outcomes more efficiently.
To learn more about implementing decision frameworks and other ready-to-implement conscious business practices, contact us. We specialize in helping teams structure problems, increase participation, and embrace transparency by applying key principles from decision science and collective intelligence.
