With the right approach and processes, you can tackle tough calls, take bold risks, empower your team and create a culture that thrives on innovation

Imagine (or relive) this: you’re sitting in a leadership meeting. You are armed with data on audience metrics, advertising trends, revenue forecasts and new tech ideas. The goal? To map out your strategy for the year. Overall:  you know that  if you don’t evolve, you’ll die. Yet, the meeting is paralyzed with the weight of your existential business challenges. Should we double down on deep reporting or pivot to TikTok video formats? Should we redesign the website or launch a new CRM? How much should we invest, and how long should we give an initiative to succeed? No one knows how to decide — or who should decide — which leads to burnout, stalled innovation, and missed opportunities.

High-stakes decision making feel overwhelming because everything seems critical in today’s news ecosystem. We know we must innovate and experiment, yet without structured decision-making processes, we can freeze under pressure. Worse, the stress and confusion can erode trust in leadership, creating a downward spiral of stagnation.  

(Part of) the solution? Defining conscious, deliberate decision-making practices that introduce clarity, empowerment, and agility to our  operations. By establishing transparent frameworks for making decisions, organizations can not only reduce anxiety but also foster a culture of innovation and resilience.  

 Why conscious and public decision-making practices matter

Conscious decision-making practices are more than an operational tool — they are a key part of organizational culture.

Drive strategic change

Our industry requires agility and change to be effective. If our decision making is unclear, or takes too long to come to an answer, then we won’t be able to thrive and transform.

Additionally, strategic change requires more than hope, wishes, and vision — it demands a systematic approach to decision-making. Formal decision-making practices create a framework to transform aspirations into executable strategy. By establishing clear practices and methodologies, news organizations can navigate complex and critical transformations more effectively. 

These approaches enable us to break down large-scale changes into manageable decision points. By creating transparent processes that map out potential scenarios, risks, and opportunities, we can make more thoughtful choices. This approach reduces the uncertainty in strategic shifts, allowing teams to understand the rationale behind significant organizational transitions and actively know their role in bringing them to life.

Empowering our people

Transparent decision-making processes clarify who is responsible for what, which reduces ambiguity and empowers each individual team member to act. We can understand our own scope of control, and what decisions we can make — which builds our own autonomy. 

When our people understand how decisions are made and feel included in the process, they are more likely to take ownership of their work. This empowerment leads to greater creativity and engagement, as people feel their voices matter. And in order to allow people to make great decisions, there needs to be greater transparency in the organization, which builds trust. 

To make this work, leaders have to be ready to delegate. Delegating responsibility is not a diminution of power — it is an investment in increased effectiveness of the organization. The best leaders encourage people to think for themselves and provide space for innovation and collaboration. Also, distributing decision making authority shows that leaders are showing confidence in their people. 

Finally, individuals have more confidence in their jobs and in the organization when they have real control and input into the work. This breaks down hierarchies and distributes power – improving how engaged individuals are in their work.

Encouraging experimentation

Innovation thrives in environments where employees feel safe to propose ideas and learn from failures – and we need that in our industry. Conscious decision-making processes provide this security by making it clear that not all experiments will succeed — and that’s okay (and expected). We want to encourage our people to be creative and take risks.  

Organizations that embrace structured experimentation build innovation into the culture. For example, defining a “fail fast” process — where small-scale pilots are quickly assessed and iterated upon — reduces the risk and fear of failure. This clarity frees teams to test bold ideas without risking personal or long-term repercussions.  

Conscious decision making practices also encourage organizations to define our success metrics and goals ahead of time. One of my favorite memories of my own experimentation was an investment into a pilot project to significantly increase traffic from social media. We set a high target and put new platforms and practices in place for 6 months. Those practices were disruptive, but worth it if the traffic change really came out. And the traffic improvement did… because Facebook turned on the firehose. We determined that it was really external factors that caused the success, and decided the changes weren’t worth continuing. It was really refreshing to declare something not worth continuing and then–stopping. It freed us up to try the next thing.

Addressing bias

When very few people in an organization make decisions, the bias of those narrow perspectives (especially if they are all at a high place in the hierarchy) comes into play. 

Think consciously about the challenges of consensus — where most people may agree to the easiest answer or the one where everyone has compromised to get to a conclusion. 

Bias can come in many different forms. Individuals may have overconfidence biases because their past successes lead them to believe they have the “right” answers. People who have similar backgrounds may unconsciously incorporate bias into their decision making. People may unconsciously shape the question in order to address the answer they already think is right. And the most recent successes may have an over large influence on current practices.

To address this, we have to encourage (and again, empower) diverse perspectives as we frame questions and evaluate solutions. We need to consider going deeply into the “why” of our answers to understand both our instincts and the sources behind them. We may want to dig into the reasons *not* to go with our first instincts, and we need to think through alternative solutions to our instincts

So then… what does conscious decision-making look like in practice?

1. Categorize the Decision

There are lots of different ways to categorize decisions. Is this a one way door or a two way door?. Is this a strategic, tactical, or operational decision? Is this an ad-hoc, big bet, cross-cutting or delegatable decision? The important thing is that different categories of questions require different levels of effort and likely different decision-makers. 

2. Determine who should make the decision

The impact and complication of a decision will affect who should make the decision. Make sure you have a defined final decision maker, who will make the ultimate final call. Decision making by consensus is a recipe for long, ineffective processes. Bias towards giving power to those most affected by the decision, and set a timeframe for the process. Consider a framework like RACI (those who are Responsible, Accountable, Consulting, and Informed in the process) to help inform who the decision maker should be.  

3. Define Procedures

As usual, there are many different types of processes and procedures — the important thing is that you have one. Whether you use Scrum Agile practices, or a multi-step process like the below, defining out what your process is needed for transparency. And make sure you put a time limit on your research and ideation – making smaller, more agile decisions is pretty much always more effective. 

4. Communicate results and iterate

And finally, put strong practices into place for reviewing what we learned from the experiment. Speed matters for innovation, but learning matters more. Invest in the structured but simple processes for identifying what we’ve learned and incorporating it into your future work. Share out what you’ve decided, what you’ve learned, and what this means for everyone.

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Cite this article

Myers, Kate (2024, Dec. 13). The Importance of conscious decision-making practices. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/the-importance-of-conscious-decision-making-practices/