This 1 Thing Increases Your Career Capital More Than Anything Else

The Art of Better Decision Making

Have you felt scared to make a decision? Maybe you get preoccupied with making the 'wrong' decision? 

Did you know that 68% of people have admitted to not doing because they thought it would be harder than it actually is.

Getting comfortable with making decisions is one of the biggest challenges new leaders face. You will be placed in situations where there isn't enough time to get all of the information. Or even harder, you will be placed in situations where you'll never get more information than what you have.

The good news?

Making better decisions is something that you can improve by being deliberate with your learning and how you choose to approach it.

This is the approach I take to decision making. These have been test and is what I have used over my 15 year career to teach and develop teams.

- Accept that you will make mistakes. There is rarely a perfect answer. Getting comfortable with ambiguity is a leadership muscle you need to train. The more you work, the better the results - just like going to the gym.

- Treat your decision making as a never ending experiment. Your goal is to gain information. The more you test, the more feedback you receive, the better future decisions will be. 

- Use tools and processes to help you better understand what you factored into your decision. Check these assumptions with after the fact results.

Here's an example of a tool, a knowledge tracker. 

Split a letter size piece of paper in two. On the left, write down everything you know about the situation. What information do you have, what are you trying to achieve or what is the problem you are trying to solve, what factors are you considering and why. 

After you make the decision, use the right side of the page to record your feedback. What new information came out that could have influenced the decision, how well did the information you have represent the situation, did everything you factored in have the impact you expected, any other pertinent feedback that came after the fact.

It's important to be aware of and limit the influence of mental traps when working on improving your decision making.

- Don't assume that the quality of the result = the quality of the decision.

This is cognitive bias is called the outcome bias. Outcome bias is when a decision is based on the outcome of previous events, without evaluating how past events developed. Outcome bias overemphasizes the outcome linking a positive outcome with the idea that it was the result of a good decision. The reverse is not making a decision based on a previous poor outcome and linking that to a bad decision.

This bias is difficult to manage as it rides the delicate line of experience, feedback and understanding. The key is to understand, test and check what information actually influenced the outcome and which didn't. Identifying these levers and correctly linking them to a result is what helps avoid this bias while gaining the right insights to make better decisions in the future.

- Every decision has a range of possible outcomes. Hindsight bias changes your perception, causing you to believe that the outcome was unavoidable.

This is a dangerous bias because it plays into our psychological preference towards certainty. We believe that we can predict the future. Most people believe that their ability to predict the outcome of future events is high and continues to get better over time as you gain more experience and expertise. 

The truth? 

Humans are exceptionally bad at predicting the future and the more of an expert you, the more likely your predictions will be prone to errors.

Hindsight bias distorts our memory by inserting new knowledge that reconstructs our internal narrative, accepting the inevitability of the outcome and eliminating the alternatives.

- Solicit more feedback. A lot of leaders will ask their team to chime in and share their thoughts. The trap is that you may be priming them. Showing a lot of confidence, sharing your opinions or beliefs prior to your team sharing theirs often influences what they share. Group think, social proof and our psychological need for community and fitting in are immediately triggered.

Ask more questions, allow your team to answer, have them share their reasons and explain what has them factoring things in as they are. Take the additional information, incorporate it into your thinking and challenge your current model.

 

To make better decisions, DO accept that it's learning process and you will make mistakes. DO treat your decision making as an experiment - hypothesize and test. DO add more structure to your thinking using simple tools.

DON'T assume that a good result was only because of a good decision. DON'T recreate past events after the fact. DON'T share first when looking for honest feedback from your team.