How to Use Decision Trees to Systemize Your Business (+ Mistakes to Avoid)

When it comes to systemizing your business, one of the hardest areas to systemize comes down to decisions. For example, you have a customer reaching out for a refund. They are technically 12 hours past your refund deadline and you're not quite sure whether you should process the refund or not. But ultimately you make a decision how? Or let's say you have a big launch coming up and you're trying to figure out should you do an email campaign, should you send direct mail, how should you structure it all? Ultimately, you make a decision. But how? So how do we actually systemize something that is as nebulous as a decision? Well, one of the easiest ways I found to do that is to create decision trees. Decision trees are made up of a bunch of multiple choice questions. When you answer one question, it leads you to another question, which leads you to another question, which leads you to another question and eventually leads you to a result. Because you have to actually write down each question you're asking in your head and draw what question to ask next. Decision trees can be a great way to externalize the logic that you just kind of know. Decision trees are also really easy to follow because they're so visual in nature. And many of us learned about decision trees in some form in grade school. When we're seeing a decision tree, it's pretty intuitive to know how to go through it and answer each question. And if we don't agree with the end result, if we get a certain result, we're like, I'm not sure we can retrace our steps in that decision tree and figure out what actually led us to that result and help us better evaluate how we could adjust that quiz moving forward. And besides just just being visual, decision trees also help us capture a whole lot of variables that would be hard to capture if we just tried to write out a word document every multiple choice question in the decision tree, each step of that journey helps people diagnose one detail further about a particular decision. One of my favorite use cases of a decision tree that we actually created in our own business comes down to inbox management, which you wouldn't think would be an important thing, but boy has it been one of the, I would almost say the most important process in our business right now. Two years ago, the inbox in this business was entirely handled by yours truly. So if you guys emailed and it took me forever to get back, then that was me, right? I was wearing all the hats and keeping up on emails was a full time job in and of itself. So when we Started hiring more people into the business. One of my main areas of focus was getting myself free of the email inbox. And one of the key things we used to make that possible was a decision tree where we said, okay, if an inquiry is about this, but not this, send it to this person. And if the inquiry is about this and this, send it to that person. This decision tree actually helped me first start to delegate pieces of my inbox. And now we have five different people that are part of the delegation chain when it comes to managing the emails that come into processdriven. That is amazing and only would have been possible if I started externalizing my logic inside a decision tree. You know, that actually makes me think, if you guys would be interested in a video all about our email system, let me know. Let's get back to decision trees. I do want to be clear here that even though decision trees can be great, there are some downsides we should be aware of. Number one is that decision trees can be a little sprawly if you try to include too much into one decision tree. So there's a contractor I worked with back in the day who had a decision tree in a flowchart for every single step involved with building custom homes. And you know who you are if you're watching this. It was amazing. It was great to see a huge decision tree breaking down every little piece of the home building process. But as you can imagine, with a custom home construction from scratch, including land development, there is a lot that goes into that. And that actual decision tree ended up being a massive spreadsheet with tons of little arrows. So let that be a lesson here. Rather than making one massive decision tree for every possible possibility, try to make a few smaller decision trees, because that'll make everything easier to navigate and just honestly less overwhelming. So while the first issue with decision trees is adding too much can be overwhelming, the second issue with decision trees is that adding too little can also be problematic. Because if we don't account for enough variables and we give a very clear answer, if there are variables that we're not accounting for, we can give someone the false impression that there is a defined answer, when really it's more of a. It depends. The last thing we want is people to have a bunch of decision trees where they're answering a bunch of questions, but they. They don't know the right answers. So they're guessing and then they're guessing, and then they're guessing and then they get to an answer based on a bunch of guesses. So we want to make sure that we're not forcing people to make decisions. And that way if something doesn't quite fit into our boxes, we're having one off conversations and expanding our decision tree or those wild card things. Downside one and two relate to the same issue of scope. The third kind of warning I have for you around decision trees is that if they are put in the wrong environment, they can come off as kind of micromanaging Y. So for example, if you are a web designer and you're trying to hire some subcontract designers to work for you, you do not want to make a decision tree telling people what color should they choose. We don't want to try to use a decision tree to dictate the decisions that should be done by knowledge workers. Pretty much anything that involves creativity or judgment or expertise, we don't want to make a decision tree for that stuff. Which sounds obvious, but I'm only saying that because I've seen people do it. So in that web design example, rather than giving a personality test to your subcontractors to tell them which color to pick instead, what if we made a decision tree asking a bunch of key questions defining what file format we need? That'll be decision making information that's actually helpful, that'll actually save people time and give them freedom to focus on the creativity and not stress about what file format they need to export, because they have a very clear decision tree asking them questions and telling them exactly what file formats they need based on the project type, based on the client type, based on the whatever. Now, the fourth warning I want to give you here on decision trees is just to make sure that every time you're creating these decision trees, you are also putting them somewhere that your team can edit them. So with the exception perhaps of subcontractors, any core team members who are helping build your business guide your business, they should have the ability to edit or at least comment on your decision trees that you're creating. The last thing you want is for a decision tree to be given to your VA who's managing your inbox. And every time she finds something wrong with that decision tree, she emails you and you have to update it and then re export it, then re upload it. Just avoid that, right? Give that virtual assistant who's in charge of your inbox the ability to edit the decision tree for your inbox. You don't want yourself to become the bottleneck on that decision tree. So you don't want to be the only one that has editing access key. Takeaway here is if you have decisions in your process and you can still systemize them, we have to be a little bit more creative than things that are one step after another, sequential processes. But we can do it. And it starts by externalizing your logic, bringing other people into that conversation, and being very empathetic about what we build processes for and how we build them. Come to think of it, it's kind of the same rules as building a process for anything else. Oh, and do write the word email in the comments below if you'd like to learn more about our email management system. I really do think that could be kind of a cool video if you guys are interested in it. Thank you guys so much for watching, and until next time, enjoy the process. Sam.