Recently, I asked Matt Hoying what's had the biggest impact on his business.

I had a shortlist in my head before he answered. A peer group. EOS, or one of the other operating systems. A coach who'd been with them for years.

Instead, Matt pointed at a diagram.

Not a complicated one. Five layers, simple enough to sketch on the back of an envelope. And yet, every decision in the business goes through it.

Matt is president of Choice One Engineering, eighty people, and this is the thing he credits above everything else.

They call it the Decision Filter.

It works exactly like it sounds. Anything the company is wrestling with gets dropped in at the top and has to make its way down through five layers. Whether to hire someone. Whether to open another branch. Big things, small things, all of it goes in.

Each layer is a question. Does this fit with why we exist? Does it fit with where we are going? Does it fit how we've said we'll get there? Can we do it while living our values? And does it fit what we've said matters most right now?

The order matters more than it you would imagine. Plenty of good ideas clear the first few layers. Far fewer survive the last one, because that's the one that asks what you're actually focused on this year rather than what you believe in general.

If something snags, it doesn't die. It goes on a list of things that aren't right for now. Priorities change, and some of those ideas come back down the line.

Here's the part that got me

Read those five layers again and notice what isn't there.

There's no revenue line. No margin threshold. No payback period. Eighty people run every meaningful decision in the business through a filter that never once asks what it costs or what it earns.

I pushed him on this, because setting goals and metrics is what it's all about, right? You can't manage what you can't measure.

Matt's answer was that the money isn't missing, it's downstream. If a decision genuinely clears all five layers, the financial case tends to already exist. Conversly, if you have to lead with the numbers to justify something, that's usually a tell.

The hard part Isn't the diagram

Like I said, the Decision Filter fits on the back of an envelope.

Filling it in is the hard part.

A filter is only as good as its layers, and vague layers catch nothing. So, Choice One had to get genuinely, uncomfortably clear on its purpose, its mission, its vision, its values and its priorities first. Clear enough that eighty people could apply them to a decision and reach an answer the leadership team wouldn't be surprised by.

That's the important work most companies skip. It's also the whole reason the thing functions.

The bit I didn't expect

What's changed most at Choice One isn't really about decisions at all.

Before, someone with a problem would walk into Matt's office and hand it to him. The receptionist is going on maternity leave. Matt, what should we do?

Now they turn up with an answer instead.

Because the filter gives people somewhere to go and think. They can run it themselves, at their own desk, without him in the room. So by the time they're sitting across from Matt, they've already done the work. Here's the situation, here's what I ran through the filter, here's what I think we should do.

He can still disagree. But the conversation has moved somewhere completely different. Instead of handing down an answer, he's walking through someone's reasoning with them.

And that, it turns out, is where the coaching happens. Every one of those conversations is a chance to show somebody how the thinking works, so they need him a little less the next time.

You can only do that if people have used their own critical thinking first.

Which brings me to the line I keep thinking about:

"It's a really cool thing when you can sit back and watch what 80 people collectively can do when they all have the same clarity and purpose and direction."

And then, straight after, almost as an aside:

"It's the reason that not everybody fits here."

Those two sentences are the same fact. The clarity that lets eighty people pull in one direction is the same clarity that shows a few of them they're in the wrong place.

That's it for this week. Leave a comment if you've got a tool like Matt's that changed how your team makes decisions. I read everything, and the good ones end up in here.

Cheers,

Jean