The Decision Matrix:

How to Prioritize What

Matters
READING TIME: 4 MINUTES

The decisions we spend the most time on are rarely the most important ones.
Not all decisions need the same process. Sometimes, trying to impose the same
process on all decisions leads to difficulty identifying which ones are most
important, bogging us down and stressing us out.

I remember once struggling at the intelligence agency shortly after I received a

promotion. I was being asked to make too many decisions. I had no way to sort
through them to figure out which ones mattered, and which ones were
inconsequential.

The situation built slowly over a period of weeks. My employees were scared to
make decisions because their previous boss had hung them out to dry when
things went wrong. My boss, a political high flyer, also liked to delegate down
the riskiest decisions. As a result, I had more decisions to make than capacity to
make them. I was working longer and longer to keep up with the volume of
decisions. Worse, I followed the same process for all of them. I was focusing on
the most urgent decisions as the cost of the most important decisions.

It was clear to me that I wasn’t the right person to make all of the decisions. I
needed a quick and flexible framework to categorize decisions into the ones I
should be making and the ones I should be delegating. I figured most of the
urgent decisions could be made by the team because they were easily reversible
and not very consequential. In fact, they were only becoming urgent because the
team wasn’t making the decisions in the first place. And because I was rushing
through these decisions in an effort to put more time into the important
decisions, I was making worse choices than the team would have.
 As I was walking home one night, I came up with an idea that I used from the
next day on, with pretty good success. I call it the Decision Matrix. It’s a
decision making version of the Eisenhower Matrix, which helps you distinguish
between what’s important and what’s urgent. It’s so simple you can draw it on a
napkin, and once you get it, you get it.

While it won’t make the decisions for you, it will help you quickly identify
which decisions you should focus on.

The Decision Matrix

My strategy for triaging was simple. I separated decisions into four possibilities
based on the type of decision I was making.

1. Irreversible and inconsequential

2. Irreversible and consequential
3. Reversible and inconsequential
4. Reversible and consequential

The great thing about the matrix is that it can help you quickly delegate
decisions. You do have to do a bit of mental work before you start, such as
defining and communicating consequentiality and reversibility, as well as where
the blurring lines are.

The Decision Matrix in Practice

This matrix became a powerful ally to help me manage time and make sure I
wasn’t bogged down in decisions where I wasn’t the best person to decide.

I delegated both types of inconsequential decisions. Inconsequential decisions

are the perfect training ground to develop judgment. This saved me a ton of
time. Before this people would come to me with decisions that were relatively
easy to make, with fairly predictable results. The problem wasn’t making the
decision—that took seconds in most cases. The problem was the 30 minutes the
person spent presenting the decision to me. I saved at least 5–7 hours a week by
implementing this one change.
I invested some of that time meeting with the people making these decisions
once a week. I wanted to know what types of decisions they made, how they
thought about them, and how the results were going. We tracked old decisions
as well, so they could see their judgment improving (or not).

Consequential decisions are a different beast. Reversible and consequential

decisions are my favorite. These decisions trick you into thinking they are
one big important decision. In reality, reversible and consequential decisions
are the perfect decisions to run experiments and gather information. The team or
individual would decide experiments we were going to run, the results that
would indicate we were on the right path, and who would be responsible for
execution. They’d present these findings.

Consequential and irreversible decisions are the ones that you really need
to focus on. All of the time I saved from using this matrix didn’t allow me to sip
drinks on the beach. Rather, I invested it in the most important decisions, the
ones I couldn’t justify delegating. I also had another rule that proved helpful:
unless the decision needed to be made on the spot, as some operational
decisions do, I would take a 30-minute walk first.

The key to successfully employing this in practice was to make sure everyone
was on same page with the terms of consequential and reversible. At first,
people checked with me but later, as the terms became clear, they just started
deciding.

While the total volume of decisions we made as a team didn’t change, how
they were allocated within the team changed. I estimate that I was personally
making 75% fewer decisions. But the real kicker was that the quality of all the
decisions we made improved dramatically. People started feeling connected to
their work again, productivity improved, and sick days (a proxy for how
engaged people were) dropped.

Give the Decision Matrix a try—especially if you’re bogged down and fighting
to manage your time, it may change your working life.