Blog Post
When decisions need to be made across multiple organizations or units within the same organization, the process can quickly become complex. Different entities have distinct purposes, legal frameworks, internal structures, and stakeholders with their own agendas. A well-designed decision-making process must account for these differences to ensure efficiency and legitimacy.

How to Approach the Design of a Decision-Making Process

Structuring the Decision-Making Process
There is no universal model for decision-making, but a structured approach can significantly improve effectiveness. Key elements include:

• Transparency – Ensuring all stakeholders have visibility into the process and rationale behind decisions.
• Defined Roles and Responsibilities – Clearly assigning decision-making authority and accountability.
• Conflict Resolution Mechanisms – Establishing ways to manage disagreements before they escalate.
• Adaptability – Allowing room for adjustments as new information emerges.

Likierman also emphasizes the importance of managing disagreements constructively. Effective decision-making structures should include mechanisms for resolving conflicts early, ensuring that progress is not hindered by stalled negotiations.
By designing decision-making processes with a clear focus on purpose, stakeholders, and legal frameworks, organizations can build a strong foundation for collaboration and development. This is crucial in any complex decision-making scenario across organizations or units within a larger entity.

Clearly Define the Purpose
The primary objective of the decision-making process must be clearly outlined. Should it lead to a binding agreement? A shared strategy? A general understanding? Without a well-defined purpose, the process risks becoming inefficient and conflict-ridden.
Andrew Likierman, in his book Judgment at Work: Making Better Choices, highlights that decision-making quality is strongly influenced by the clarity of purpose and the ability to distinguish between necessary and desirable outcomes. Defining the purpose early allows decision-makers to focus their efforts and resources effectively.

Understand Stakeholders and Their Frameworks
Identifying key stakeholders and understanding their motives is essential. Decision-making structures must balance competing interests and align incentives for collaboration. Additionally, different organizations operate under different legal and operational constraints, such as laws, internal statutes, and financial limitations. A well-designed process accounts for these factors to ensure both legitimacy and feasibility.

Structuring the Decision-Making Process
There is no universal model for decision-making, but a structured approach can significantly improve effectiveness.

Key elements include:
• Transparency – Ensuring all stakeholders have visibility into the process and rationale behind decisions.
• Defined Roles and Responsibilities – Clearly assigning decision-making authority and accountability.
• Conflict Resolution Mechanisms – Establishing ways to manage disagreements before they escalate.
• Adaptability – Allowing room for adjustments as new information emerges.

Likierman also emphasizes the importance of managing disagreements constructively. Effective decision-making structures should include mechanisms for resolving conflicts early, ensuring that progress is not hindered by stalled negotiations.

By designing decision-making processes with a clear focus on purpose, stakeholders, and legal frameworks, organizations can build a strong foundation for collaboration and development. This is crucial in any complex decision-making scenario across organizations or units within a larger entity.

Blog post
How can leaders drive innovation in fields they are not experts in?
Innovation is often framed as a specialist-driven process, requiring deep technical knowledge and cutting-edge expertise. But in many organizations, leaders are responsible for driving innovation in areas where they are not subject-matter experts. This presents a paradox: how can leaders enable meaningful innovation without a deep technical foundation in the field they are overseeing?

This challenge is not new, but it is becoming more pronounced as digital transformation and sustainability reshape industries at an accelerating pace. Leaders must navigate this complexity, ensuring that their organizations remain competitive while fostering an environment where experts can thrive.

The Leadership-Expertise Gap
Throughout my career, I have led large teams of knowledge workers across disciplines such as environmental science, water, planning, and economics. My academic background was in ecotoxicology, yet I found myself responsible for business units that spanned multiple technical fields. This is a common reality for leaders: we are often at the helm of specialized domains without being the most knowledgeable person in the room.

The dynamic has become even more evident in recent years with the rise of digitalization. While I have found it relatively intuitive to engage in sustainability-driven innovation, digital transformation has often felt more elusive. Not because I did not recognize its importance, but because the underlying technologies—data analytics, automation, AI—demand a different kind of fluency. And yet, as a leader, I was responsible for ensuring that digitalization was integrated into business strategy and operations. This is where leadership plays a crucial role. The challenge is not to become an expert in every field but to create the right conditions for innovation to thrive.

Bridging the Gap Between Leadership and Innovation
Research has shown that organizations with strong innovation cultures often have leaders who act as facilitators rather than directive decision-makers. A study by Cross, Taylor, and Zehner (2018) in Harvard Business Review highlights that the most successful leaders of knowledge-driven teams do three key things:

1. They build and sustain networks of expertise
Instead of trying to master every technical detail, effective leaders focus on connecting the right people and fostering collaboration between experts.

2. They create an environment for psychological safety
Innovation flourishes when experts feel they can experiment, challenge assumptions, and share insights without fear of failure.

3. They translate technical insights into strategic impact
Leaders must bridge the gap between deep technical knowledge and business objectives, ensuring that innovation aligns with overall strategy.

Lessons from My Own Experience
In my years leading teams and working on strategic transformations, I have found three approaches particularly useful when leading innovation beyond my own expertise:

1. Focus on the right questions, not the right answers
Leaders do not need to have all the answers. Instead, they need to ask the questions that help experts connect their knowledge to broader business goals.

2. Balance autonomy and alignment
Innovation happens best when experts have the freedom to explore, but with clear strategic direction to ensure their work contributes to the organization’s goals.

3. Leverage external perspectives
Engaging with industry networks, research institutions, and diverse stakeholders provides fresh insights and prevents internal blind spots

The Path Forward
As organizations continue to evolve in response to global challenges, the ability to lead innovation beyond one’s own expertise will be a defining skill for modern leaders. Whether in sustainability, digital transformation, or other fields, success will depend on our ability to connect knowledge, empower experts, and translate innovation into real impact.

If we get this right, we do not need to be the smartest person in the room—we just need to ensure that those who are have the support, resources, and strategic direction to succeed.

In recent years, the need for psychological safety in the workplace has been a frequent topic of discussion – and for good reason. Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson in her book “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth,” is the foundation for a culture where employees feel comfortable voicing their ideas, taking risks, and speaking up without fear of negative consequences. This culture fosters creativity, collaboration, and innovation, which are essential to an organization’s growth and success.

In Denmark, earlier this year, the book “En medarbejders bekendelser” by Louise Dinesen, Stephen Holst, and Katrine Asp-Poulsen offered a compelling perspective on leadership from the employee’s point of view, detailing what good leadership looks like—and what it doesn’t. Leaders are now bombarded with insights and frameworks on how to lead with a focus on people. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

However, leaders are also tasked with delivering results. You may have set the targets yourself, or they may have been imposed by others, but the expectation remains: your organization must perform. John Doerr’s “Measure What Matters” emphasizes this performance-driven mindset, showing how setting clear objectives and key results (OKRs) can fuel growth and success.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with striving for both—a thriving, happy workforce and a high-performing organization. In fact, that’s what leadership is all about: ensuring that goals are met while maintaining employee well-being and satisfaction. But, in practice, this balance can be difficult to achieve.

At Vang & Co., we don’t claim to have a quick fix for this dilemma, nor is there a one-size-fits-all model that works for every organization. The key lies in understanding both the organizational and human contexts, tailoring solutions that work in practice. Here are some important considerations for leaders working to find that balance:

Practical Steps for Leaders

Clarify Your Leadership Framework
Be transparent about the conditions you are operating under. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that guide your leadership? How much freedom do you have to implement your own solutions?

Understand What Motivates Your Team
Spend time with your colleagues, understand their perspectives, and explore what motivates them in their daily work. This helps in aligning their aspirations with the organization’s goals.

Empower Decision-Making
Identify areas where you can give your team the autonomy to make decisions. Where there’s flexibility, involve your colleagues in the decision-making process, allowing them to co-create the path toward reaching your shared goals.

Seek Feedback and Continuously Improve
Regularly follow up, evaluate, and solicit feedback. Use this feedback to engage in productive dialogue with your leadership about how future goals and expectations can be shaped in a way that benefits both performance and employee well-being.

Balancing performance with psychological safety is not easy, but by understanding the unique dynamics of your organization and taking these steps, leaders can work towards creating a workplace where both can coexist successfully.
Good luck on the journey!

Leadership today requires more than just setting goals and directing action—it calls for a shift in how leaders guide their teams toward success. Many leaders start by taking a more directive approach, offering clear instructions and holding a firm grip on outcomes. However, as organizations and teams grow in complexity, the need arises for a more nuanced approach, where the leader becomes a guide, or even a beacon, illuminating the way forward rather than dictating every step.

Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig, in their book “Humility Is the New Smart,” propose that one of the most critical traits for modern leaders is humility. As they argue, leaders today must let go of the need to have all the answers and instead focus on creating environments where learning, collaboration, and innovation can flourish. This shift toward humility allows leaders to better connect with their teams, build trust, and inspire others to contribute their best ideas. Leaders who embrace this mindset move away from being megaphones that simply project their own ideas and become beacons that shine light on what matters most—values, shared goals, and collective actions.

Hess and Ludwig emphasize that humility in leadership doesn’t mean weakness or indecisiveness. Instead, it means recognizing that leadership is about facilitating growth in others by creating the conditions for success. Leaders acting as beacons cast light on key priorities and empower their teams to take ownership of how those goals are achieved. This approach promotes a culture of trust, where employees feel valued and motivated to collaborate on solutions that advance the organization’s mission.

Appreciative Inquiry: Focusing on Strengths
While humility is essential for modern leadership, it must also be complemented by an ability to recognize and amplify what works well within the organization. Appreciative Inquiry, a framework developed by David Cooperrider, provides a method for leaders to do just that. Appreciative Inquiry encourages leaders to focus on strengths, successes, and the positive elements that already exist in the team. This approach shifts the focus from fixing problems to enhancing what is going right, thereby fostering a more positive and productive environment.

By asking questions such as, “What are we doing well, and how can we build on it?” leaders help their teams recognize the value in their current efforts and encourage them to expand on their successes. This practice aligns perfectly with the ideas from “Humility Is the New Smart,” where leaders step back from controlling outcomes and instead support their teams in driving their own development and achievements.

Practical Steps for Leaders
At Vang & Co., we don’t believe in simple models as easy answers to complex problems. However, we do believe that it’s possible to suggest steps that leaders can thoughtfully incorporate into their practice.

Clarify the vision and values
Leaders who act as beacons help their teams understand the larger purpose and values of the organization. By being clear about what truly matters, leaders can guide teams to align their efforts with these priorities while allowing them the autonomy to figure out how to get there.

Cultivate Humility and Self-Reflection
As Hess and Ludwig stress, humility is about recognizing that you don’t have all the answers. Leaders should practice self-reflection and foster an environment where everyone’s ideas are valued. This openness helps create a more inclusive and innovative team dynamic.

Foster Autonomy in Decision-Making
Give teams the freedom to make decisions within a clear framework of values and goals. By doing so, leaders empower their employees to take ownership of their work, leading to more engagement and better outcomes. This autonomy should be guided, not controlled, which is the essence of the beacon model of leadership.

Apply Appreciative Inquiry
Make a habit of highlighting strengths within the organization. By focusing on what’s working well, leaders can cultivate a positive atmosphere that encourages growth. This approach complements the humility-based leadership model by focusing on collective learning rather than individual control.

Continuously Seek and Give Feedback
Feedback is critical for continuous improvement. Leaders should actively seek feedback from their teams and use it to adjust their approaches. By inviting feedback and engaging in dialogue, leaders can ensure they are guiding their teams in a way that aligns with both the organization’s goals and employees’ well-being.

Leadership is not about simply issuing commands—it’s about inspiring, empowering, and guiding teams toward success by focusing on what truly matters. By embracing humility and fostering a culture of growth and collaboration, leaders can transform from directing to illuminating. As modern organizations evolve, leaders who act as beacons—lighting the path with clear values and a focus on strengths—are better equipped to create environments where both performance and well-being thrive.

Good luck in creating sustainable success by facilitating a shared journey for you and your colleagues—focusing on collaboration and growth, rather than attempting to control every step along the way.