If Ann and Bill agree that X is the best decision but Ann thinks Bill wants to do Y and Bill thinks Ann wants to do Z, have they made a decision? If Ann starts implementing X, then finds out that Bill has started work on Y, most of Ann’s work will be a waste. And vice versa for Bill. Not to mention all the other stakeholders. So neither of them will start to adopt/implement X until they need to know that everyone else involved will be doing it too.
In an environment where your understanding of the situation is rapidly changing, and much of the communication involves a subset of stakeholders, it can be hard to tell when everyone has agreed. In other words, there are two separate components to making a decision:
Getting every stakeholder to agree that it’s the right decision.
Getting every implementer to recognize that all the stakeholders have agreed.
Step 2 can be straightforward for clearly defined, narrowly scoped decisions with a small number of stakeholders. But in a biotech organization, many decisions require coordinating across multiple teams and functions with very different mental models. This is particularly true for decisions that involve getting data from bench to data teams, and getting insights back into the lab.
What’s your strategy for getting them to recognize when they’ve agreed?