When Is Decision Governance Needed?

How can you tell if there is a need to do anything to influence how decisions are made, that is, to govern decisions? If any of the following apply, then it is worth investing effort to improve how decisions are made. 

• Low confidence: People expected to take action as a result of a decision behave as if they do not have confidence that the decision which was made is the right one. They may ignore the decision, that is, not take action that’s expected of them. They may simply do something else that may be inconsistent with, or independent from the decision. It will take more time and resources to recover alignment, and it may not be achievable at all. 
• Poor recall: A simple and frequent problem is that the rationale for a decision may be forgotten long after it was made. A decision may have been made years ago, but you may need to make a new decision now, and you would want to avoid risks that may have been well understood in the past, and which may occur again. You do not know if anyone considered these, and if they did, how they mitigated them – in absence of the records about how the decision was made, who made it, and why, more time and money needs to be spent now to redo at least some of the past thinking.
• Procedural quality: While low confidence and recall, and to some extent regulatory and standards compliance, are about managing risks, procedural quality is about increasing the quality of the decision, by believing that if the decision is prepared in a specific way, it will yield a better outcome. Procedural quality refers to the idea that if you improve the quality of the process that leads to a decision, you will increase the probability of getting the desired outcome from the decision.
• Regulatory compliance: Regulations may require that some types of decisions are made in ways which satisfy specific requirements. It may be necessary to make and keep records of specific decisions. There may be rules for how to engage stakeholder groups (see, for example, my notes on the Algorithmic Accountability Act, starting here).
• Standards compliance: Industry standards may specify requirements on decisions. Many of the requirements in such widely used standards as ISO9001 are about how and who needs to assess impacts and risks, make decisions, and record and preserve these.