The Organizational Network Fieldbook: Best Practices, Techniques, and Exercises to Drive Organizational Innovation and Performance

13.3. Quantifying the Costs of Inefficient Decision Making

The team had to convince top leaders at Cedarwood that concentrating decision making at the VP level was hurting—not helping—the company. Team members knew that most of the company's executives had strong backgrounds in science or marketing and thus would be particularly receptive to graphic and numerical representations of the problem.

The team began by showing Cedarwood's decision-making network maps to executives and pointing out their centrality in the networks. The message was: "The good news is that you're clearly important to the business. However, your centrality is also creating a problem." One VP remarked:

It wasn't until I saw myself and my fellow VPs at the center of these ...