Julia Langkraehr’s Blog

How EOS and Bold Clarity helps with our decision-making process – by Keren Lerner of Top Left Design

How EOS has helped me make better decisions

Keren Lerner is the owner of our clients Top Left Design, a design and marketing agency she founded in 2002.  Here she discusses how her decision-making processes have changed since her company started implementing EOS in 2015. 

In the past when I had a business worry, I would either mull it around for ages, procrastinate thinking about it, or (most often in my case) make a quick decision so I could just move on with my life!

If it was business decisions it would inevitably lead to animosity with my team – especially if a decision was related to their work (ie hiring someone new, taking on an intern, working with a particular client, pricing a project a certain way). Now it’s a whole different story!

Working with Bold Clarity has helped us with so many new tools – many of which come into effect in our 90 minute weekly team meeting (which is called a “Level 10” meeting).

Here’s is our new decision-making process

Something is troubling me/I know I have to make a big decision – I add it to the issues list.  Examples:

  1. How do we structure our pricing for our services?
  2. Who do we need in our extended team helping us with projects?
  3. Which processes can we improve for testing and launching websites?
  4. Ways of marketing our services to existing clients
  5. How can we improve communications and avoid misunderstandings in various situations?
  6. How to work better with our suppliers / deal with suppliers who may be causing problems?

When we have our weekly Level 10 meetings we take an issue, I explain what the issue is to the team, and then we all have our say on it.  In EOS, this is known as IDS – Identify, Discuss Solve.

We decide on next action points – what need to be done and who would do it, and then the issue becomes a “to do” – which means we can (for now) mark the issue as solved because we know we’re taking steps toward sorting it out.

“To do” actions can be things like:
  1. Researching alternatives
  2. Finding out the real numbers that we need to know to make an informed decision
  3. Drafting messages for us to send to clients/contacts/suppliers or anyone else who needs to know.
  4. Each of us taking on a batch of communications/activities to get messages out there
  5. Updating certain documents/disclaimers/terms and conditions

We read our “to dos” out loud to each other at the end of our Level 10 meeting and this reminds us who’s accountable for what.

This means the decisions take up much less of my head space – I just jot some notes down and know we have our weekly 90mins time to discuss it as a team.

I no longer feel like it’s all on me – my team is the best sounding board for most things.

Now we’ve been implementing EOS, and using the IDS for such a long time, we have overcome many issues in our team which just don’t exist anymore, and we are so good at coming up with what actions are required.

It makes me feel “everything is figure-out-able” – with the support of my team and the system we use. I don’t make snap decisions that I’ll regret later, I don’t avoid important things and I am much more certain I am doing things the right way!

If you would like to find out more about implementing EOS in your business, and how it can help with decision-making and other key processes, contact us for a complimentary introduction.