Making the decision and committing to it

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Sometimes there is no downside to delaying a decision; such as when you can’t implement the decision yet, when delaying doesn’t cost you any options, or when there is nothing and nobody waiting on you.

If there are strong benefits to making the decision now and real downsides to delaying it any longer, then you have to get on with it and make it.

If you are making a decision, first you want a transparent prioritisation of the different factors that you’re using to make it. This is important because it will help you to justify the decision to yourself - giving you more confidence in it - and it will also help when you communicate the decision to stakeholders.

When it comes to assessing your choices, some people prefer to do this in the round, playing back everything they’ve discovered and worked through in their mind, but ultimately using intuition and instinct to reach a decision. Others prefer a more a structured way and there are frameworks that can help with this. e.g.,

Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes determining the approach you’ll follow to make your decision and then take the necessary time to process the variables, reach a decision and commit to it.

Avoiding pitfalls and blindspots

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To reduce blindspots, follow WRAP:

Potential blindspots include:

Your task for today is to review what you’ve done so far and whether any of these blindspots might be present in your own process and if so, how you might mitigate them.

Predicting the outcomes

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Before you can decide which option to take, you need to deal with the uncertainty surrounding each of them.

Unknowns can be categorised into 3 types:

There is a strong correlation between astute decision making and the willingness to embrace uncertainty and accept it as a given.

Your task for today is to try and adopt a humble mindset where you recognise that you can’t guarantee you know everything and embrace that. Then spend 5-10 minutes predicting the outcomes of your different options:

Generating alternatives

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The question of “which one” is always better than “whether or not” when it comes to making decisions. There is plenty of evidence that shows a strong correlation between a higher number of alternatives and decision success.

Generating alternatives as a separate exercise, after having created your initial list, can help because it provides distance in your mind from your initial thinking.

Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes developing alternative ideas for your list:

Determining your options

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When figuring out the options available, you need to be open-minded and adopt a creative mindset. Try not to apply any constraints or consider the implications - just think imaginatively. You’ll have the ability to dismiss things later on.

Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes exploring those questions:

Involving the right people in the right way

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A decision stakeholder is anyone who is involved in or affected by your decision.

There are three different types of stakeholders:

These 3 types are not mutually exclusive either, and a person can fulfil any combination of the 3 roles.

Your task for today is to spend 10-15 minutes deciding who to involve and how.

Defining the scope

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When it comes to making decisions, transparency is your friend. You want to increase your awareness, your knowledge, your understanding and to do this, it requires you to carefully think through what’s going on.

The first step here is to try and capture the context surrounding your decision as a question.

Spend 5-10 minutes asking yourself:

This visibility alone is a huge first step in helping you to make a better decision because it greatly heightens your awareness.

Putting yourself in the right mind-set

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When making a decision want to adopt a mindset of patience and confident readiness. That way you won’t be too hasty, but still ready to act when necessary.

Your task for today is to take a few moments to reflect and decide:

Then carve out regular intervals, dedicated to the decision, to ensure you don’t dwell on it when you need to focus on other things. Add timeslots to your diary and include reminders to:

Why be a structured decision-maker

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Decision-making requires you to predict an uncertain future and regardless of how good someone’s intuition is, no-one can perfectly predict the future.

A well-structured decision-making approach helps leverage your intuition whilst filling in some of the pieces you may have missed otherwise.

The premise is that you can’t always make the right decision… but you can always make the decision right.

At a simple level the process will involve three parts:

Your task is to identify a decision that you need to make either in your work or your personal life, that is:

Evaluating outcomes and providing feedback

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Once delegated work has been delivered back to you, you’ll want to set aside enough time to review it thoroughly and offer feedback to the person who delivered it.

Compare their work to the desired outcomes that you mutually agreed when you delegated the task. Success should be measured on as consistent and objective basis as possible to maintain a feeling of fairness and trust between you.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll want to provide them feedback on whether their work falls below, meets, or exceeds objectives.

If the work falls below the desired outcome, be clear on why the work doesn’t meet the objectives and the reason for proposing any suggested changes.

If their work meets or exceeds the desired outcome, tell them this. Feedback should always involve recognition of success. You can opt to praise them which should help build their self-confidence and motivation, improving their experience, your relationship and making it easier to delegate to them in future.

However, it would be worth going beyond just praise of their success and additionally provide them with detailed feedback on how they’ve leveraged and developed their strengths.

Your activity for today is to review any delegated work that’s been returned to you recently and determine what feedback you should share. If you need help developing your feedback, consider listening to the BOSSIT series on “Sharing Valued Feedback”.