An easy way to start making policy is to take a moment to record decisions you’ve made and why you made them.
When you can articulate the reason for key decisions, you make it much easier to make similar decisions in future – or better yet, easier for someone else to make a good decision without needing to come to you at all.
Peter Drucker describes four types of decision:
1. Decisions for generic events, of which the individual occurrence is only a symptom.
These are questions or problems that keep cropping up in the same or in slightly different form. An example might be repeated questions from clients about a specific service – our question is ‘how should I answer’?
There are three ways to save time with problems like this:
- Make the decision about what you’ll do and how you’ll do it, and document it. In this example, it might be writing a template email that provides key information in an appropriate tone. Copying and pasting and tweaking an email is far easier than reinventing the wheel each time.
- Find a way to make the problem solve itself. A good-quality FAQ section on your website might reduce the number of people who end up emailing. (But whatever you do, don’t send people who email to the FAQs without copying the relevant paragraph into your answer).
- Eliminate the problem. Few problems or questions are inevitable. Is there something you can do to eliminate the need for the question? This could be a case of designing a better product, or investing in a better ‘wrapper’ – one that puts the necessary information in the hands of your client exactly when they’ll need it.
2. Decisions about problems that seem unique, but are actually generic
Your problem might be new to you, but be common to all organisations. Financial management, child protection policies and performance reviews are examples of this.
There are established standards and processes like double-entry bookkeeping because everyone has to deal with money. If they help – and they’re likely to – use them.
Ask for help, learn from others, then be generous in sharing what you know when someone asks you.
If there’s nothing helpful out there – could you share yours once you’ve made it? How about open-sourcing your policies to save others from reinventing the wheel?
3. Decisions about exceptional events
Unique and unrepeatable events are rare – do the best you can.
4. Decisions about exceptional events that turn out to be generic
It’s possible that you’ll come across an apparently unique problem that turns out to be, in Drucker’s words, ‘the first manifestation of a new genus… the early manifestation of a new problem.’ Try to look closely and see, then treat as in (1), above.