DECIDE A. EXECUTE A.

Thinking Like Your Boss

What does an organisation do with a decision once it has been taken?

A decision that is not yours

You will work neither on your company, nor on your organisation, nor on any of your files.

A company is given to you. Its business model is set. A strategic destination — A — is decided.

At the stage entrusted to you, your expertise must allow A to continue on its trajectory.

The distance is deliberate. It makes it possible to observe decision mechanisms before habits, internal histories, hierarchical relationships or knowledge of the “real file” come in to explain what happened.

The leader can come with their team: they live the same experience and then look together at what they did.

Then the organisation goes to work

Finance, Legal, Risk, Compliance, HR, operations, strategy: each then works with their expertise, methods, processes and responsibilities. The question is not whether each does their job correctly. It is to look at what the exercise of these jobs does to A.

Does expertise equip the strategy so it can cross the constraints it meets? Or does its own frame end up covering it?

  • Does expertise equip A? Does it produce the information, options and conditions that let the decision pursue its trajectory? Or does it gradually begin to cover it?
  • Is a process applied as a means of executing the decision — or does it itself become the destination?
  • When a step in the process harms the business model you were asked to protect, does anyone see it? Does anyone say it?
  • Who then owns the decision to continue, to modify A or to decide another?

Observe before correcting

Thinking Like Your Boss is not an assessment. It does not seek to identify “good” and “bad” members of a team. It places the leader and their team in a situation outside their organisation so that they can observe together how they work around a decision.

What appears may be perfectly functional. It may also reveal a trajectory that bifurcates, a function whose position deserves review, an expert output that does not sufficiently equip the decision, or a piloting rule left implicit.

These are observations. They then make it possible to know where to work, if work is needed.

The place we work

Quinta do Griffo · Colares, Portugal

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