Building in intentional time to engage in thoughtful decision-making

A decision pause can help leaders slow down decision-making and engage in deeper analysis to make the best choices to support staff and students.

To slow down decision-making to be more thoughtful and engage in a deeper analysis, leaders need clear mechanisms for productively leaning into and learning from conflict, tensions, and uncertainties. Pausing allows for team reflection and the inclusion of diverse perspectives.

Use this in order to…

• Reduce contrived urgency in decision-making.

• Develop more distributed leadership and shared decision-making.

Key Components

• All stakeholders need to be invited to meetings and must be given equal time to talk. Leadership may need to deliberately hold back from speaking first so that other staff members feel they can speak freely.

• Create shared norms for the conversation.

• Ask team members to play devil’s advocate – putting forward the most compelling arguments they can come up with both for and against an idea.

• Once the group has made a decision about which direction will be taken, honor that decision.

• Schedule a follow-up meeting if a decision cannot be reached to reduce urgency.

Considerations for Remote Implementation

• In a hybrid environment, where some participants are together in a physical space and some are remote, create a consistent way for all participants to join a meeting via their laptop using a video meeting platform.

• Use collaborative documents for staff to share ideas. This can be done before, during, or after meetings, and this approach helps ensure that everyone’s voice gets included.

The Remote DEI Collective was a collaborative group led by The Learning Accelerator (TLA), and brought together participants from remote organizations to address the challenges of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in remote environments. This strategy has been adapted from the Remote DEI Collective’s toolkit, which was built to offer resources to improve remote culture and practices, in order to better suit leaders and educators working for schools that offer virtual and hybrid learning options to students.