Making Good Decisions
Our life is defined by the outcomes of the decisions that we make.
To achieve our personal and professional goals, we need to make the best possible decisions.
Amazon’s Leadership Principles have succinctly defined the trait that they look for as seeking those people that ‘Are Right, A Lot’.
Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgement and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.
— Amazon's Leadership Principles
Making good decisions allows you to focus your efforts in those areas that will move you closest to your goals.
In Managing for Business Effectiveness (HBR, May 1963), Drucker discusses the problems with “Misplaced emphasis” and highlights the importance of managers focussing their resources (whether financial, industry or talent) on the wrong problems.
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
— Peter Drucker
So, how can we set ourselves up for success?
Understanding the Decision
To be right, a lot, you need to fully understand the decision ahead of you, the operating environment and the consequences of the different options open to you.
Defining the Operating Environment
Unless you possess a thorough understanding of the environment and the likely consequences of the potential decisions, you are not setting yourself up for success.
To build this understanding, many turn to the Feynman Technique which, briefly, involves describing the topic as simply as possible as if you were speaking to a small child. Having to use plain language prevents you from hiding behind domain-specific technical jargon and builds knowledge from first-principles.
Communicating the Decision
Once you possess a good understanding of the domain in which you need to make the decision, you need to clearly and simply articulate what should be done and why to the people that will be impacted by your choice.
Military leadership have faced with this problem for hundreds of years and most modern organisations have adopted variants of the five-paragraph field order. Traditionally, these have a single paragraph dedicated to each of the following topics;
- Situation
- Mission
- Execution
- Admin / Logistics
- Command/Signal
An adaption of this framework for the corporate world involves tweaking the structure to include the sections listed below.
Background
Clearly describe the current operating environment. If you don’t fully understand this yourself, then that should be a warning sign. To develop your understanding, use the Feynman Technique and then use this plain description to set the context for your colleagues.
Goal
Clearly define what you are trying to accomplish and why that has been chosen as the goal.
Plan
Once the goal has been defined, and the operating environment is well-understood, you are well-positioned to prepare a robust plan to achieve the goal.
Logistics
This section details who will be responsible for each step of the plan and, if required, what the governance structure will be used while delivering the plan.
Communications
Now that a solid plan has been defined and people are working to deliver it, you need to ensure that all those impacted by the work will be informed in good time. This section defines the various groups of stakeholders and who is responsible for informing each.
Conclusion
While this process will be overkill for many of the decisions that you make throughout the day, I have found it to be a very useful tool when contemplating how to respond to larger challenges. Specifically, the order of the sections has prevented me from defining a Plan without having a fully complete understanding of the Situation. Then, after having invested the time to develop a profound understanding of the Situation, being able to describe that in plain terms helps share that understanding with your teams to help them make more informed decisions later in the process.
Have you found this approach useful? I’d be interested to learn what works well for you; please join the discussion on Twitter.