Five principles of open decision making - TechInvest Magazine Online

In an era of constant disruption, business leaders are kept on their toes to continually innovate, and more importantly, innovate faster than competitors and disrupters.

Bard Papegaaij, Research VP at Gartner, is of the view that, “to reap the benefits of digital business, leaders must take a “culture-first” approach to business transformation”.

I agree with him. Unfortunately, culture can be one of the hardest things to change.

How do you engage the right people in the room and get them to work together openly and effectively? This is one of the questions that lead to the creation of Red Hat’s Open Decision Framework, the company’s collection of its own best practices for making decisions and leading projects at Red Hat.

Conceived and evangelised by Red Hat, the Open Decision Framework can apply to the wider business community going through a transformation journey, because it encourages decision makers and leaders to seek out diverse, sometimes opposing, perspectives to help discover the best ideas and enable collaborations among teams and countries.

The five principles

For Red Hatters, the Open Decision Framework illustrates an open source way of working, taking five open source principles – open exchange, participation, meritocracy, community, and “release early, release often” – and putting them into practice.

1. Open exchange: It begins when people share. A free exchange of ideas is crucial for enabling an open environment, where people are encouraged to learn, share, and create innovative ideas. The role of a leader in this process is to lead with transparency and identify any parts of the process that cannot be open, as well as to set expectations upfront and manage expectations along the way.
2. Participation: By collaborating and capitalising on the collective wisdom of a community, problems can be solved more easily than someone tackling on their own. In addition, by encouraging participation from everyone, fresh ideas and thinking can be uncovered that may have been overlooked before. Leaders should engage diverse groups of people for input early and often to make it easier for people to participate.
3. Meritocracy: Good ideas can come from anywhere within an organisation, and the best ideas should win. Everyone should have an equal chance to provide ideas and be supported from the organisation when doing so.
4. Community: Often formed and driven around a common purpose, a community can bring together diverse ideas and expertise that can create a powerful multiplying effect. A story to demonstrate how we have embraced it at Red Hat, associates helped to write the company’s mission statement – To be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors and partners creating better technology the open source way.
5. “Release early, release often”: Rapid prototyping can lead to a better solution faster. When people are free to experiment, they can look at problems in new ways and find answers in new places. To help succeed with this approach, organisations should openly share progress updates on projects, encourage feedback, show how that feedback is being incorporated, and be able to change direction if something isn’t working.

Making open decision pervasive

The Open Decision Framework can evolve, as Red Hat learns new things.

Originally created to help sustain and scale with a growing open culture, this framework continues to evolve at Red Hat as new techniques and approaches are learned.

It encapsulates Red Hat’s best practices for making decisions and leading projects. Much of it is unique to Red Hat’s culture, but we decided to share it with the world, by publishing a community version.

Making it public and community-based is also in response to requests from outside organisations to apply open source principles within their own firms.

The Open Decision Framework is flexible and offers practical steps to help improve decision making.

It is a Red Hat tried and tested way to help drive collaboration, engage stakeholders, manage competing needs and priorities, communicate trade-offs, and manage business requirements.

Go ahead, give it a try in your next project, then share with us your experience.