Making Better Decisions

This is my first personal blog entry ever! I'm honored to have been asked to contribute to Habitat's blog and will do my best to keep things interesting and informative. I assume I was asked to participate because of my expertise -- such as it is -- in energy efficiency, but having been pretty active on several boards and having always been excessively opinionated, I'm going to feel free to address topics well beyond boilers, windows and pipe insulation.

If you speak to professionals who work with co-ops or condos, one of their most frequent comments is that boards take forever to make a decision. This should not be very surprising; most boards are composed of volunteers with little or no special expertise and lots of other demands on their time. And it's always easier to do nothing or put things off than to forge ahead and possibly make a (co$tly) mistake.

But what really gets me is how often the expenditure of time and effort appears to be in inverse proportion to the cost or importance of the decision. I often see boards decide to spend substantial dollars with almost no discussion and at the same time take months to pull the trigger on a relatively trivial item.

My favorite example of this is a building that debated for more than two years what sort of luggage carts to purchase! The building had three entrances and thus was considering purchasing three carts -- you've seen them, the kind that are like the ones used in hotel lobbies. Decent ones go for about $500 each, so they were looking at an expenditure of about $1,500.

The building had about 600 units and lots of people bringing things in and out all the time. The annual budget was about $2.5 million -- yes, million. The board spent hours debating the issue; meanwhile, all 2,000 residents were significantly inconvenienced every time they brought groceries or furniture or just about anything else home.

When they finally voted to do the deed, it wasn't even unanimous. Three of the 9 members had serious reservations!