How to Decide

• Decision-making is one of the most difficult skills to master as a manager.
• Almost never is there all the information needed or wanted to make a choice and wait long enough then chances are context and options have changed enough to make the decision framing all wrong.
• The essence of an agile organization is figuring out how to make fast progress against larger goals, learning and adjusting along the way.
• The quality of your decisions is the currency of leadership.

Intuition

Often, your gut often knows the answer. I know you don’t want the answer to be “feelings,” but sometimes feelings are wiser than thoughts. In a world where both “X” and “Not-X” are convincingly peddled as The One True Way, you might need something outside of pure logic to resolve the path. Many a times, you are just looking for data to support your intuition.

Peacetime vs Wartime

Decision making is different in bigger, stable companies vs smaller companies looking for product-market fit. Or those undergoing a crisis.

• Wartime
  • Don’t ever be worried about deciding in the most top-down, non-empowered, toe-stepping manner when facing a true crisis. That’s what leadership is all about.
  • Operating all the time in crisis mode or thinking every choice is existential is just not sustainable as a company or leader.
• Peacetime
  • Most decisions are relatively minor.

Reversible vs Irreversible

A startup’s competitive advantage is execution speed. That quickness stems from a CEO’s ability to decide and this ability separates the great from the good.

There are two kinds of decisions: 

1. Reversible: Two-way doors. Most decisions are changeable, reversible. You don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through.
2. Irreversible: One way doors. These decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.

As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight decision-making process on most decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.

Urgency and Quality of decision-making

How to make high quality decisions which seem urgent:

1. Check Your Work
   • Reflect on the decision and check your work, even if you have taken a similar decision in the past.
2. Ask for Help
   • It is difficult due to the perception that asking for help is somehow an admission of weakness.
   • However, asking for help, the clear articulation that you don’t know, is a defining trust-building moment with the team.
3. Slow Down
   • The urgency is often the lie. Everyone can clearly see a big decision needs to occur. It’s also readily apparent that it’s entirely yours to make. This combination of the decision’s magnitude and obvious single ownership creates pressure. Don’t confuse pressure with urgency. Don’t confuse importance with urgency.
   • Slowing down gives you the time you need to check your work. 
   • Slowing down gives you the opportunity to ask for all the help. 
   • Taking time to think on the most critical decisions is how you build a higher quality decision. 
   • By slowing down, you drain the emotion, urgency, and irrationality that often arrive with these decisions, and you are able to see what’s important versus what everyone is urgently yelling.

Remember:

• The quality of your decisions are the currency of leadership. You won’t be judged on how quickly you decide; you will be judged by the consequences of your decision that appear in the hours, days, weeks, months, and years after you decide.
• You’ll need to explain these potential consequences when you’re presenting your decision to everyone. That’s when I know I’ve decided. It’s not that I can explain the decision, it’s that I can tell you the story of how I decide, what I expect to occur as a result, and what we’ll do if I’m wrong. And you understand.

CEO’s role in decision-making

Before you decide something, you have to have an idea of what role you are playing in the process. It is easy to be a boss and assume people need your wisdom, advice, or context.

You could be playing any one of these roles:

1. Initiator. Kicking off new projects.
   • Write it down in a way that someone joining the project later can quickly get up to speed. Writing is thinking, so taking the time to gain clarity on what to do and what success looks like only helps.
   • Initiating is the only time an exec does the work of an individual contributor.
2. Connector. Connecting people to others across domains so the work gets better.
   • Anything crossing functional lines requires a connection. The exec is in a unique position to be constantly connecting functions and work.
   • Don’t assume everyone or the right people will read everything or interpret correctly.
   • Execs should be thinking about what to connect almost all of the time. Connecting skilfully is a force multiplier.
3. Amplifier. Amplifying the things that are working well or not so there is awareness of success and learning.
   • The most compelling efforts to amplify are supported by great stories — when taking the time to amplify something, do so with the whole story and the background that makes it worth amplifying. It is one thing to tell people something important, but another to describe why it is important.
4. Editor. Fixing or changing things while they are being done.
   • Editing is the right of a boss, but also a privilege in a team made up of smart and creative people. Everything about editing is in how it is done. Poorly done, editing makes people feel bad and never generates the best work (except for Steve Jobs as many like to say). Done well, and editing makes everyone feel better about the collective effort.
   • Do so in-person. The vast majority of editing feedback comes across as negative and critical. For better or worse, editing without verbal context or worse just being critical over email almost always makes things worse.

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