Process and Organization

Decision cycle

To make a change, our company must go through a decision cycle, as illustrated in the figure that follows. Someone must sense that a need exists. Someone must decide that a feature will fit that need and that it’s worth doing…and how quickly it’s worth doing. And then someone must act, building the feature and putting it to market. Finally, someone must see whether the change had the expected effect, and then the process starts over. In a small company, this decision loop might involve just one or two people. Communication can be pretty fast, often just the time it takes for neurons to fire across the corpus callosum. In a larger company, those responsibilities get diffused and separated. Sometimes an entire committee fills the role of “observer,” “decider,” or “doer.”