Decision making in your organization: Cutting through the clutter
At the root of any good decision is categorizing what kind of decision needs to be made, by whom, and how quickly.

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/decision-making-in-your-organization-cutting-through-the-clutter

Great discussion on the process of decision making. Go to the site for a full discussion including a podcast

The decision-making process should be a choice, where you have a level of commitment that drives action. If the commitment and action isn’t there, then something’s wrong in the decision process, itself…. 

…. The other thing that we’ve observed is some best practices around decision making are situational. For some types of decisions, those best practices work brilliantly, and for other types of decisions, they’re terrible. If you don’t apply the right best practices in the right way at the right time, you can get things that don’t work. It’s not enough to say, “I have experience, and I know what makes a good decision.” You have to say, “What am I optimizing for?” With decisions that can be quickly undone, you should take a lot more risk in making a wrong decision, because you can undo it. Decisions where the stakes are high and you can’t undo them need to be a lot more thoughtful and carefully planned 

.... we’ve found that it’s helpful to talk about four different kinds of decisions. 

One is your classic big-bet decision, where you’re making a decision that’s going to have enormous implications for the company. It’s often not easy to undo it. It might be an acquisition or a merger. It might be a major capital investment. That’s the first type. 

The second type is a decision that isn’t actually a single decision. We call it a cross-organizational or a cross-functional decision, where many different parts of the organization are involved and there are lots of little decisions that accumulate to a larger decision. A good example of this might be something like pricing or decisions in a supply chain. 

The third type of decision is one that can easily be delegated to a particular role—somebody who has enough knowledge to make a good decision, may interact with other people to get feedback and perspective on making the decision—but does not need to be made in a committee and does not need to be drawn out. It does not need a carefully mapped decision process. 

 There is a fourth type, ad hoc decisions, which are decisions that are infrequent and reasonably small and contained, where you don’t try to figure it out or map it out ahead of time. You just say, well there’s a bunch of stuff that might bubble up, and we’ll deal with it as it comes up. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.