Running an Istanbul development team and a Nairobi clinical team out of one investment committee sounds like a governance problem. In practice the governance was the easy part.
What actually took the time
Not the strategy, and not the reporting. What took the time was the ordinary friction of two organisations that were awake at different hours, held different assumptions about what a decision is, and had never met.
- A development team treats a date as a commitment. A clinical team treats it as a forecast subject to a regulator. Both are correct in context.
- An approval that takes an afternoon in one market takes a committee cycle in the other, and neither team believed the other until they watched it.
- Written English is a second language for most people involved, and a great deal of apparent disagreement was vocabulary.
The two teams did not need to work the same way. They needed to stop being surprised by each other.
Three things we would do differently
- Put them in a room in the first month, not the sixth. The cost of the flights was recovered several times over in decisions that stopped needing three rounds.
- Write down what a decision is. Who makes it, what makes it final, and what re-opens it. We assumed this was shared and it was not.
- Stop translating culture into process. Our first instinct was a new reporting template. It solved nothing and consumed a quarter.
What worked
One overlapping hour, held every week, with an agenda neither team owned. It is a small thing and it did more than the template.