You make dozens if not hundreds of decisions daily. Thousands if you count all the subconscious ones like when to hit each key, how far to move your mouse, etc.
Consider just the active, conscious choices. How many of those would you say are “big” in a day? A week? A year?
How do you evaluate your decision-making process for those “big” decisions?
You probably base that on how the decision turned out. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? A decision is only as good as the outcome?
Resulting
Unfortunately, the world isn’t that simple. You can make decisions based on an excellent process and get a bad result. Luck, and the actions of others, can turn your good decision based on a strong decision-making process into an outcome you think sucks.
Does that mean you should scrap your decision making process and flip a coin next time?
You can make a decision based on terrible reasons and process and get lucky for a good result. Undeniably, luck is great when it works for you. Should you rely on it?
When you focus on the result, you start to believe in the thing(s) you did when the outcome was good. Regardless of the skill used to get that outcome.
Poker players call this “resulting” – equating the quality of a decision with the quality of the outcome. It’s why your buddy bets really big on that bad hand that everyone else would fold – it worked big just enough to believe it’s a strategy, not simply luck.
You can categorize decisions broadly this way:
| Good Outcome | Bad Outcome | |
| Good Process | Reliable success over time | Isolated Bad Luck |
| Bad Process | Isolated Dumb Luck | Reliable failure over time |
When you’re experiencing repeated bad outcomes, hearing a lot of blame and justification, that’s a sign that the decision making process is bad.
Black Box Process
Can you describe the decision-making process for your organization that impacts your work?
Often, organizations have “processes” that involve scheduling meetings with multiple senior people, who effectively are human “black boxes” when it comes to decisions.
You offer data about cost, time, potential return, and other factors. Questions for more information about some of those things might hint at what thinking is taking place inside the black box. Then, a decision pops out of the box.
Team members now spend time “reading tea leaves” to understand how the decision was reached. If lucky, you may get one expressed value, like “We’re doing this because it will grow monthly users.”
Rarely do you grasp all the context and process thinking that went into the decision.
Demystify Decisions
How can you make better decisions individually and as part of a team?
- Ask to make values explicit. What criteria and values are making the choice?
- Known data. How do you know something, and are you certain? Put a “confidence level” on knowledge – 100% certain, 80%, 50%, etc.
- Unknowns. What do you not know, and how much do your unknowns potentially impact the decision? What would it take in terms of time, money, etc, to make an unknown become a known? Would it improve confidence in the decision?
- Acknowledge and understand your opportunity costs. When you say yes to something, what are you saying no to?
- Build a decision tree, weighted by likelihood. What decision are you weighing, what outcomes are possible, and how likely do each of those outcomes seem? And how valuable is each of those outcomes?
- Find someone outside of the decision that you can evaluate the decision process with, without the outcome. Separate the result from the decision making.
Building a stronger decision-making process pays off. You will end up with more of what you want and less of what you don’t want.
Is that worth it to you?
You can do this. I can help.