Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Aaron De Smet and Leigh Weiss for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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Great Britain decided to leave the European Union. Apple bet on iPod, iPad and iPhone. Amazon is weighing where to locate a second headquarters. These are big-bet decisions with a broad impact and significant value at stake for organizations.

They’re also risky and often involve a high degree of uncertainty. If you wait for certainty, the chance to make a bold move – say, about strategic direction, M&A and resource allocation – usually has vanished.

Truisms abound for making big decisions. Think hard about your options. Bring insight, not just intuition. One organization has posted this sign: In God we trust. All others must bring data.

Yet, getting the basics right isn’t sufficient generally. In our experience, organizations that consistently make decisions well use three ingredients. They emphasize decision velocity as much as decision quality. They add more debate and mitigate bias, and they choreograph the process from start to finish. Let’s look at each:

Make speed part of the process: It’s often better to make a fast decision with 80 percent of the necessary information and analysis than wait until everything is available. We’ve seen companies wait so long to acquire a target that in the meantime, a competitor grabs the prize. To avoid this, senior leaders must focus on the decisions only they can make – setting strategy, (re-)allocating resources, M&A, bold commercial moves, etc. – and delegate the rest.

Also, involve more people but give fewer a vote. Favor dynamic debates with lots of input, then shut it down and decide. Be clear about where decision-making resides – an individual or committee. If it’s a committee, who specifically has a vote? Break up the biggest decisions into meaningful chunks that can speed decisions when that’s critical. But design them to accelerate decisions by taking good ideas quickly to the next phase of exploration and analysis.

Stop presenting, start debating: Healthy tension, constructive dialogue and conflict spark high-quality decisions. This requires a foundation of trust and healthy team dynamics plus high-caliber leaders with good interpersonal skills and diversity of people and perspectives. Our research shows that quality of interaction trumps analysis every time. With those elements, you’re far more likely to make a good big-bet decision.

Diversity, focus and healthy conflict also help correct for inherent biases that often sneak into decisions, including by executive-level committees that can serve as an echo chamber to amplify rather than mitigate such biases. Historians often cite international events as examples of such groupthink, including the ill-fated 1961 Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.