Navigating the Complex World of Decision-Making
"Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide."
– Napoleon Bonaparte
Decision-making is something that we need to do daily. We make decisions for our lives, our work and our loved ones all the time. Sometimes, decision-making is complex. We are afraid to make a wrong decision or sometimes any decision at all because of the change it will bring. And sometimes decision-making is easy: what will I have for lunch? In organisations, I notice some patterns around decisions and decision making.
Here are some insights and some ideas on what to do differently.
1. The Dilemma of Unmade Decisions
One of the most pressing issues in decision-making is the problem of unmade decisions. These decisions often remain pending due to uncertainty, lack of clarity about who is responsible, or fear of making the wrong choice. This procrastination can lead to missed opportunities and increased stress.
An ex-colleague decided to look at the impact of unmade decisions on the organisation in which he was working. He counted and classified all of the unmade decisions and looked at data about how long they had been hanging around and what the impact was.
He worked out it was costing the organisation millions of dollars a year.
2. Who Should Make the Decision?
Clarity around decision-making authority is crucial. It can result in indecision and delays when it's unclear who is responsible for a decision. Sometimes, it's really unclear if this is a group decision and we are looking for consensus or if this is just a decision that someone needs to make and we are looking for input, and then one person will decide. Sometimes, it is also unclear what the final decision was, and then we end up revisiting decisions again and again.
3. The Fear Factor
Fear of making the wrong decision can be paralyzing. This fear often stems from the possibility of negative consequences and the potential for backlash. To overcome this, it's essential to create a decision-making environment where it's safe to take risks and where learning from mistakes is encouraged. If everyone is afraid of the consequences of a decision, then it takes even longer for people to commit. Constraints and small experiments can help people know the boundaries so they know what decisions are theirs to make and what risks are ok to take. As a manager, I often noticed that people would want to run decisions past me. Most of the time they were doing the right thing, they just needed someone to double check.
4. Revisiting Decisions
In a rapidly changing context, decisions made yesterday might need to be revisited today. Flexibility is critical; be prepared to adjust decisions based on new information or shifting circumstances. This approach helps manage uncertainty and adapt to evolving situations. I remember during the early days of COVID-19, things were changing so fast that I would make a decision and then make the opposite decision an hour later. It's ok to revisit decisions based on information and changing contexts.
6. Weaponized Decisions
At times, decisions can be used strategically to gain leverage or influence. This "weaponization" of decisions can create conflicts and undermine trust. It's crucial to address such issues and work towards a collaborative approach to decision-making. When some people hear the phrase "Why don't you decide?" or "What do you think?" from a superior or boss, they hear things like "If you get it wrong, you get fired" or " You better not mess this up" or ''This is a test, and I'm waiting for you to fail". If we want to delegate decisions to subordinates effectively, it needs to be safe.
7. The Role of Decision-Making Styles
Different decision-making styles, often linked to leadership styles, are sometimes necessary in different contexts. From authoritative to democratic approaches, understanding these styles can help tailor decision-making processes to better suit the needs of your team or organization. I like to use a coaching and democratic stance with my team as much as possible, but there are some decisions where I need to be somewhat authoritative and just decide. Embracing a "disagree and commit" mentality can also be beneficial, where team members openly express their dissent but ultimately support the final decision.
Rock-Paper-Scissors and Other Tools
So what can we do about some of these things? How do we improve decision-making and decrease unmade decisions or even, in some cases, the speed of decisions? Here are some ideas.
Clear decision frameworks.
Myself and 2 wonderful ladies were collaborating together for about a year. We had a remote course we were running, and we were doing speaking engagements in pairs, and we had a blog and a community that we were supporting. We began to realise that we were often waiting to make decisions or we were always asking all 3 of us before we made a decision, and sometimes we were waiting because we had asked and we were waiting for a response. We realised that we needed to create a decision framework for ourselves that could help us to make decisions faster, easier, and with confidence.
So, we set up three categories: decisions we can make alone, decisions we can ask one other person, and decisions we need to clarify with all 2 of us.
We took all the recent decisions and added them into these categories. This included how much money we could spend alone or how much discount we could offer to people for our remote courses. We created so much clarity and easy constraints. We stopped asking each other for the decisions we made alone and just shared the information, and many of the other decisions became that much faster and easier.
I have done similar things in organisations and with teams and their managers. Once people know the boundaries of their decision capacity, they feel that much more free to make decisions.
In some situations, methods like rock-paper-scissors can offer a quick and effective way to make decisions, especially when the stakes are low. These tools can serve as a reminder that not all decisions need to be complex or fraught with tension.
While working as a polo groom in England, I worked with a guy from Zimbabwe. We used Rock Paper Scissors as our decision framework. Every time there was a choice about activities, we would play rock paper scissors and sudden death (only 1 round), and the winner would get to choose what they did. This was really effective for us because we both agreed to the process and the outcome and so we always accepted the results.
These methods can have a big impact on unmade decisions and the lack of clarity around who needs to make a decision.
Visibility of decisions and decisions about decisions
As a facilitator for an exco session a few years ago, the CEO became quite frustrated about why nothing was happening with regard to a certain program. he was quite clear that a decision about how to move forward had been made and was annoyed that there was no progress. I wasn't so sure that the decision was either made or clear, and so I asked him to repeat the decision that had been made. I was note taking on a flip chart and wrote it down.
I noticed, as I added additional notes and more people added input, that I was asked to return to that page 3 times during that meeting. For me, that was a clear indication that the decision was not clear or remembered. As a leader for a small organisation, I also struggled with this until I realised that we need to be clear upfront.
It can be helpful to be clear at the beginning of a meeting, what are the decisions we are making here, who has the final say, and if we are making consensus decisions, can we get to a disagree and commit place? Sometimes it's difficult to get everyone to agree on 1 path or 1 tool or one thing, so being clear that we are going to get enough consensus and then ask people to disagree and commit can be helpful.
Then, we need to make sure that the decisions we have made are visible and well-communicated. I found it helpful to write things down so that everyone can see them because that way if people are interpreting things differently, it's a good opportunity to make the decision clear, and then I also like to ask. Ok, Is this what we are deciding now to make it clear that it's a decision?
Making it safe
Virginia Satir speaks about the five freedoms that she wanted everyone to have, and one of those was "The freedom to take risks on my behalf". Creating safety is an important step to empowering people and making it easy to make decisions, and some of it also needs to come from inside individuals.
For leaders and managers, giving people clear constraints can make it easier for them to make decisions. Making sure that you support the decisions that your team members make even when they are wrong is important. For people to be able to easily feel safe and make decisions, they need to feel that their decisions are supported. I would support my team's decisions even when I didn't agree. When I didn't agree, I would have that conversation with them one-on-one, and we would tackle the changes together, but I would always support the decisions they made with the rest of the organisation or with the clients. At the same time, I made sure that the repercussions of the decisions that they needed to make were small enough that we could recover. So that if they got it wrong, it was safe to fail.
So, in summary, in order to make it easier for people to make decisions, create clear decision frameworks, make decisions visible and clear, and make it safe for people to decide.
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