The New Normal? Five Questions That Will Reinvent Business Decision Making After Covid-19
“Business decision-making has changed more in the past six months than in the previous sixty years,” said Eugene Roytburg, Ph.D., decision science expert and Managing Director at Fractal Analytics, in our recent conversation. “The Covid-19 crisis forced every executive to make rapid decisions with previously unimaginable impacts, while everyone switched to online remote work at the same time. It’s astonishing.”
Recent statistics support his insight. A McKinsey study found that 82 percent of executives said they make decisions faster now, and half say much faster. Simultaneously, the number of meetings required to make decisions plummeted — major business decisions are now half as likely to need six or more meetings. And all this is happening with almost all collaboration now mediated by technology.
But Dr. Roytburg’s more significant insight is about what’s missing from this transformation. “Our previous research found that no executives had a clear memory of how many and what decisions they made in the past year, and only 14% had a vague recollection. If you project that forward, that means we are missing out on an incredible opportunity for organizational learning. How can our companies learn from our past decisions to make our next ones better? It’s a critical theme for business in the post-Covid-19 world.”
