Using principles to help scale decision-making across the organisation

Principles can help tip the scales in favour of decisions that affect the organisation's direction and are made at every level. Principles can help codify part of the organisation's strategy.

Photo by Alex Presa on Unsplash

The idea of using principles to help with decision-making is appealing.

Principles can play a crucial role in making strategic choices explicit and ensuring decisions align with them. They can be a mechanism of empowerment while providing context for strategic choices.

Unfortunately, in many cases, a lot of effort is put into drafting principles—often too many—and not nearly enough effort is put into ensuring the principles are given the support they need for decision-making.

This is the classic case of spending a lot of energy creating a document everyone has had a say in and a strong degree of alignment on. And then it gathers dust in a drawer, unreferenced, unconsulted, thoroughly ignored. What a waste!

It's not always a waste. Sometimes, creating the document is enough, and the alignment from the conversations in its creation carries through. But that’s rare, especially the larger the organisation, especially in organisations that have become adept at creating documentation that has never been used.

In this post, I will share some ways of thinking about and using principles that may help you get the most value from the effort to decide on and draft them. I will share what they are, why they exist, and what you can do to help ensure they are useful and used to empower decision-making.

What are principles?

I won’t bother with a formal definition—there are plenty of searchable definitions you can look up. Instead, I will focus on how I understand them, as that may help provide a shortcut to understanding principles, their purpose, and how to leverage them effectively.

• Guidelines for decision-making.

• They are not values (values are behaviours) but are likely framed by them.

• Nor are they actions. e.g. ‘Install windows’ is not a principle.

• Emphasises what is essential about the organisation.

Principles represent choices and enable decisions to be made across the organisation that are consistent with those choices.

What is the purpose of principles?

The purpose of principles is to support empowerment whilst also providing guidance.

They support and guide decision-making where the work is happening rather than at the source of the principles.

Principles may be used by different types of leadership in different parts of an organisation. They may come from senior leadership, specialists responsible for a given domain, or even collaboratively created and refined by all.

For instance, architectural principles may be developed by architects, software engineering leadership, or even with contributions from all those engaged in software engineering via processes such as Request For Comment (RFC).

Where and when are principles used?

I have observed many organisations using architectural principles, and I have also observed design principles at a similar frequency.

Another way I have used Principles is as part of a Technology Strategy.

Principles are a great way to articulate choices that may deliberately address previous behaviours that need to shift to support the successful realisation of the strategy.

When are principles appropriate?

Due to their purpose and nature, principles are appropriate only when an organisation cannot solve the problems of consistency of decision-making and empowerment more simply.

They are for

If you are a small, single-team startup, you may not need principles, as conversation and agreement will more than suffice. Most small teams can use more informal ways to keep decisions aligned to their strategy.

What I cover in the section for subscribers

1. How do we define principles?

   1. Steps to Defining Principles

   2. Less is more

   3. Drafting an individual principle

2. How do we leverage a set of principles?

   1. In communicating strategy

   2. Where decision-making happens

   3. In feedback on decision-making